While recently visiting Pensacola, I stayed at a hotel that offered, among its many amenities, a library. A plaque on the wall told me that it had been donated by a couple in 1994, and after looking at every title on the shelves, I settled for Tours of the Black Clock. Admittedly, the selection was pretty awful, or I would have never chosen a book that included "Adolf Hitler" with "twisted erotic fantasies" in the blurb, but with such high commendations printed on the same back cover, I decided it was worth a shot.

The book is good, and it's written pretty well, but I almost put it down several times within the first 50 pages. It just had a little too much of that late 80s/early 90s shock value sex that unfortunately made permissible the trash that the Palahniuks and Welshs of the world have passed off as literature for the past two decades. In defense of Tours, "it" is much less obnoxious and ultimately worked pretty well throughout the novel. After I realized that the sex wasn't there as the book's only hook and actually contributed to the increasingly interesting story, I kept reading.

Ultimately, the novel is about a large man who becomes Hitler's personal pornographer, and, in doing so, creates an alternate Twentieth Century in which Germany doesn't lose WWII because Hitler is too busy reading porn to get his ass kicked attempting to invade Russia. It sounds bizarre, but the previous sentence really does set the stage for an interesting read. As I mentioned before, it's well written, even mesmerizing at times.

My criticism lies in the author's tendency to over create, his eagerness to tell bits of story for no apparent reason. I think it could have been neater and just as effective. This is most apparent near the end. The novel suffers from how-do-I-wrap-this-crazy-story-up syndrome, but does recover slightly at the close.

The main bunch of characters are nicely developed, and I even found myself rooting for a few of them despite countless moral failures. I'm happy I read this book and expect it to bounce around my brain for a bit.

Phenomenal for its handling of pov alone. Also very funny (perhaps surprisingly).

A completely off-the-wall book about Hitler's American-born pornographer. Strange, to say the least, but beautiful and thought-provoking as well.

This is really good!

Things you have to deal with when reading this:
n    · a blurring of which characters are real and which are imagined n  
n    · some nuanced POV shifts n  
n    · time being much less than linear n  
n    · the idea that Nazis could've won WWII, and that Hitler could've grown elderly n

It's fun. It tries to mesh Einstein's Theory of Relativity with some ideas of alternative history, thus Hitler winning the war. It's a neat trip.

I would give it five stars, but there's a bit too much Banning (which is probably part of the point), and he's not very likable.

Recommended for people who are okay with everything mentioned in the list above.

A kind of Nazi fever dream. But in a good way.

I liked this book, but I'm not at all sure that I understood it. The writing is compelling, almost hypnotic -- I found it difficult to put down -- but I always felt as if the actual meaning was hidden just around the next corner. Or as if the true meaning had trickled out of the sentences just before I got there, leaving only enough shape to hint (or misdirect?) as to what was going on. Mulholland Drive meets Borges, Jorge meets The Guns of the South?

This is a story about...well, I'm not just sure. It's about Geli Raubal (but not the real one). It's about Dania, a woman who isn't Geli Raubal (except sort of, in someone else's head). It's about Banning Jainlight, who is in love with Dania (or maybe he just invents her). It's about Jainlight's pornographic stories about Dania (or maybe they're true stories of his love affair with her). It's about "the most evil man in the world," i.e. Hitler, who is obsessed with Jainlight's porn about Dania because in his head it's about Geli Raubal, (and who ends up a sad, pathetic, senile old man). It's about Marc, the son of Hitler and Dania, or maybe Jainlight and Dania, or maybe just Dania herself (or maybe he's fictional too).

All these people cross back and forth between realities, or maybe between reality and unreality, in a weird braiding of time and space. Some of them seem to have doppelgangers, or alternate versions of themselves, like Jainlight/Blaine, or Dania/Geli; sometimes their worlds intersect or bleed into one another; sometimes one is the other's dream. It's never clear what's real and what isn't. The most extreme example may be the silver buffalo, which you'd think pretty much have to be a metaphor since they come perpetually pouring out of a black cave and some people can't even see them, but yet they're substantial enough to trample Dania's mother to death in Africa and rampage through the streets of Davenhall Island off the coast of Washington state. Are they the hours and minutes of one reality pouring out into another?

But the book is also about love and hate and cruelty and pity and obsession and fear and loneliness and forgiveness and good and evil. The main character, Jainlight, refers to Hitler as the most evil man in the world, and about himself and occasionally the entire twentieth century as irredeemably evil, but I ended up thinking that this book is much more about the redemptive power of love/forgiveness, although it's sort of tucked into the corners of the story as it were. I don't know what Erickson's intent was, but I ended up feeling desperately sad for every single person in this story, even crazy senile pathetic old man Hitler.

If all of this makes it sound like the book is strange and puzzling and perhaps unsettling, that's good because it is. Don't let that stop you from reading it. But don't expect a straightforward narrative: it's more like a spiral or a double helix or one of those complicated Spirograph patterns.

(NB: I have to admit the metaphor of the "black clock" was entirely lost on me -- no idea what that was meant to be about. Why black? Why a clock? What is this about numbers falling? Why is Marc listening for ticking icebergs at the end??)

A poetic, mythopoetic fable that echoes outwards from itself. Really remarkable book, and a disorienting, intoxicating reading experience. Recommended.

I fought it at first. It wasn't easy to let go, but once I did. . .really I had great adventure with this book. One worth going back to again.

This book takes the alternate history thing (you know, Axis wins World War II) and fucks with it so completely that you won't know if you've just been beaten over the head with a stick of The Grotesque or seduced by some dark phantasm from your subconscious. Answer: both.

Erikoinen kirja. Lievästi sanoen. Tuli mieleen jotenkin Pynchonin Gravty's Rainbow, mutta ei tämä niin sfääreissä kuitenkaan mennyt. Silti jossain vaiheessa luovutin yrityksen oikeasti ymmärtää mitä tässä tapahtuu ja nautin vaan hyvästä tekstistä. En mä edes tiedä yhtään lopulta kuka oli kuka ja teki mitä, ja monenako eri inkarnaationa. Mutta ei väliä, kivaa oli.

I've been thinking a lot about this book recently - two months after finishing it Banning Jainlight haunts me like an unscratchable itch on a phantom limb. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Steve Erickson is really a powerful warlock and his magics are threaded into the words of his novels. Bewitching, truly.

This isn't my favorite novel I've read all year, but it is the one to which my mind keeps returning. Erickson's protagonist struggles to understand what it means to be alive in a world that became untethered in the 20th century. We all serve at the pleasure of history Jainlight opines. In another aside he offers this beauty:

n  

In my time, I have no reason but to believe that whatever God exists is a God of revenge. A God of revenge in a century of revenge.

n

The author takes one of the worst participants in last century's 100 years of misery - Adolf Hitler - and makes an alternate history equally as absurd as the real one. It works on a level so visceral it makes for a reader's discomfort and reveals even more about our world than a fictional story told in a setting of true history. Not unlike an adult fairy tale.

I purchased two more Erickson novels after finishing this book, but now I'm almost afraid to start the next one. What dark magic will his other works contain?

DNF. I didn't know where this novel about Hitler's private pornographer was going, and I really didn't care. I stopped at 65%. The prose was occasionally beautiful, but the story was surreal, depraved, and perplexing. It played with timelines, points of view, and alternative history to an extent that I found frustrating rather than playful or experimental. It’s not that I wasn’t up to the challenge. The whole point of it eluded me.