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Days Between Stations

steve erickson

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In a world of cataclysm and unraveled time, a young woman's face, a misbegotten childhood in a Parisian brothel, and the fragment of a lost movie masterpiece are the only clues in a man's search for his past. Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations is the stunning, now classic dream-spec of our precarious age -- by turns beautiful and obsessed, haunted and hallucinated, in which lives erotically collide, the past ambushes the future, and forbidden secrets intercut with each other like the frames of a film.

249 pages, Paperback

First published April 12,1985

This edition

Format
249 pages, Paperback
Published
January 1, 1988 by Futura
ISBN
9780708837580
ASIN
0708837581
Language
English

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About the author

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steve erickson

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Steve Erickson is the author of ten novels: Days Between Stations, Rubicon Beach, Tours of the Black Clock, Arc d'X, Amnesiascope, The Sea Came in at Midnight, Our Ecstatic Days, Zeroville, These Dreams of You and Shadowbahn. He also has written two books about American politics and popular culture, Leap Year and American Nomad. Numerous editions have been published in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Greek, Russian and Japanese. Over the years he has written for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, Conjunctions, Salon, the L.A. Weekly, the New York Times Magazine and other publications and journals, and his work has been widely anthologized. For twelve years he was editor and co-founder of the national literary journal Black Clock, and currently he is the film/television critic for Los Angeles magazine and teaches writing at the University of California, Riverside. He has received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and twice has been nominated for the National Magazine Award for criticism and commentary.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
34(34%)
4 stars
34(34%)
3 stars
32(32%)
2 stars
0(0%)
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100 reviews All reviews
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ukato_ahsan
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Uneven. That's my ultimate word on this book.

The comparisons to Pynchon, DeLillo, and Nabokov are almost laughable, and I can see why those guys come to mind in terms of tone and themes, but the prose doesn't even approach them. This novel had a grand idea and Erickson developed an intricate riddle for the reader to solve as she reads it, which I always appreciate, but the language is so flowery and dreamlike that it overshadowed any real gut emotion that was trying to surface. I've read his The Sea Came in at Midnight that he wrote 15 years later, so I understand that this debut novel was really just several tests to see what works and what might need to be hacked. I don't think I enjoyed this, overall, but I can see it for what it is and respect that.

Oh yeah, the sex scenes were really cringey - does Erickson think doggy style is the only way to fuck?
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Teckmeister
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Having only ever read The Sea Came In At Midnight and detect a fluid, yet discursive narrative style that I’m eager to see whether it casts across his writing in general. The books were written fourteen years apart (published, rather, 1985 vs. 1999) and the narrative digressions are breezier with the earlier book. There’s an amazing concatenation of character strands that fascinated me in The Sea Came In At Midnight (as much as it didn’t quite satisfy as a whole) that suggests a more mature writer.

Days Between Stations was his first novel, and I don’t mean to say the digressions are leaden. Not at all, but it is certainly moored, another way to say made heavier, by a silent-film centered around the death of Marat. The book centers around this, in multiple eras, and joins Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions in a kind of sub-industry of novels dealing with faded, near, alternative, shadow stars from the early days of cinema. (And both are pleasing in the same way.)

So, I came in expecting one thing, something along the lines of to the well-travelled, skimming brevity of lonely yet vibrant lives and ideas of the later novel, and got something more dreamlike and strange. This isn’t Erickson’s fault, although the title suggests road trips, discovering America, buttes and deserts.

The oneiric portions roll off me, however, and it feels he’s straining for affect. The portions in the Paris brothel early on feel too cooked-up to be impactful, the digression with the Montreal youth and his father (and the flintlock!) too narratively frothy to sink in, and the Adrien/Michel, eyepatching, love triangle stuff too ungrounded to really sing to me. (I remain a guy who hates to hear about other people's dreams.)

This feels like apprentice-work, but unlike most novels of the kind, it's far too assured and unique to be dismissed out of hand. He remains a writer I find very intriguing and I look forward to reading more.
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ryuzakiraiga
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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"You got Pynchon in my sci fi!"

"You got sci fi in my Pynchon!"

"I hate Pynchon!"

"Go to hell! This is delicious!"

"I don't know, pretty bland and incoherent to me."

"Well, do you want the rest of my big ol' bucket o' Pynchon? I gots some rainbow gravity, some Mason-Dixon..."

"NO FOOKIN THANKS!"

"OK then just give our accident two stars."

"Yeah that's what I just did, Steve-O."

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JustAnAddict
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Thomas Pynchon isn't exactly a heavy blurber, so when I saw his rapturous blurb for this 1986 book, I decided to give it a look, even though I'd never heard of the author. Holy cow, how could I never have heard of this author? I have since learned he's been championed by Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, William Gibson, and Richard Powers. This, his first book, is just about perfect - a melancholy meditation on identity, romance, apocalypse, and silent film. The main plot hinges on a a mysterious film that's been in production for 70 years but has never been screened - I have to think DFW was influenced by this when he came to write "Infinite Jest."
Erickson is still writing - in fact, he's just published his ninth novel. I am in the happy position of having a lot of good reading to look forward to.
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bigbigboyman
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Este libro es un tesoro irrepetible. Lo editó Pálido Fuego y lo elogió Pynchon, dos datos que ya configuran un punto de partida más que interesante.
Ahora bien, navegar entre las aguas de la prosa de Erickson es mucho más. Una historia fascinante escrita con un talento apabullante. En "Días entre estaciones" somos partícipes de un juego compuesto de sueños, cine, amor, memoria e identidad, en un contexto de catástrofes climáticas, el cual no parece tener mucho protagonismo durante el libro pero sí enlaza y acompaña magistralmente con los temas y el contenido de las historias.
¡Brillante!
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Dan_imals
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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6.3

i almost dnf the book because I found the love triangles and the constant shift into dream-like sequences quite tiresome and distracting. however, the book became interesting when it started exploring the myth-making of a lost silent film in the middle part. the atmosphere switched to a period piece, and that caught my attention.
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NoGround
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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En esta primera novela se entrecruzan varias búsquedas: los orígenes de unos personajes desarraigados/desmemoriados entrelazados con otros de dos generaciones antes en la Francia de principios del siglo XX; su devenir en un contexto que amenaza con descarrilar en una catástrofe natural; y, para mi el más atractivo, el rodaje y el destino de una película llamada a cambiar el lenguaje cinematográfico. Como historias dentro de algo más grande Erickson es tremendamente sugerente, en espacial en la construcción de imágenes. En Días entre estaciones hay fragmentos de una poética vigorosa, caso de los capítulos que desarrollan una violenta tormenta de arena en Los Ángeles; un París asolado por una ola de frío glacial, con cortes de electricidad y la gente tirando de todo tipo de combustibles para conseguir calentarse mínimamente; o un viaje en barco por un Mediterráneo menguante.

La carencia de una estructura nítida que enhebre los diversos relatos, sin embargo, desencadena un curso errático, salvado durante dos tercios de novela por lo poderoso de las imágenes, sentimientos, hechos. Erickson se zambulle de lleno en una narración claramente surrealista que prescinde de certezas e insinúa, elude y sugiere mientras se pasa por el forro cualquier limitación genérica. Lo que no le evita entrar en pérdida en las últimas 70 páginas, de las cuales apenas rescataría alguna respuesta más o menos clara.
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