I have never read anything quite like this and will be soon reading as much Erickson as I can get my hands on. What can I say? Strange and fascinating story, compelling and mysterious characters, swirling through sandstorms, floods, gritty and crowded clubs, Venice, Los Angeles, Kansas and Wyndeaux...trains, bicycles, a silent film, a boat and a bottle with two eyeballs floating inside... I stand in awe of this book.

I'm only half way through this book but it is such a relief to find a book in which i can find so much enjoyment reading! It has been far too long and i am immensely thankful to Erickson for this amazing piece of literature!

Uno de los libros más extraños que me he leído. Pero bonito.

The segments about film are fascinating for anyone interested in cinema, but a better source of Erickson's movie thoughts is his recent novel Zeroville. I do kinda like what Erickson does here with the dystopian background, which is that he keeps it in the background. Kinda like in Children of Men, how the camera is constantly moving and showing us glimpses of frightening destruction, but it's never really the point of the foreground action. But frankly most of this book stinks, especially the romantic scenes which are laughable romance-novel stuff infused with pomo pretensions. At the end, I didn't even care that so many of the needlessly labyrinthine plot's loose ends were left untied, because I had nothing invested in the characters or the story. So yeah, stick with Zeroville.

Strange and surreal; disorienting and dreamlike; confusing yet compelling; a critical achievement, but probably not for everybody

Days Between Stations is a book of strange loves at the onset of the strange times…

This desire was so lacking in her that she was afraid to reach down inside herself for one passionate connection, because she was sure that passion would be just the thing by which she’d bring everything to a close; she didn’t have even the passion for dying. She spent long hours smoking dope, and by seven at night when the fog came in from the sea she’d get up from the bed to open the window; and lying back on the bed she closed her eyes, perhaps lost consciousness, perhaps not – she didn’t know how long it had been before she opened her eyes and saw, every night, the gray cloud hovering over in the light from the desk lamp, blooming like an ash rose and enfolding her. More marijuana; more fog; more guilt: and the shifting hejira into the longest lost night of all – that was where she was going.

The days are strange and they’re full of ominous apocalyptic events… She has lost her first grand love… But she finds her other grand love – engulfing and devastating… And this love oddly echoes the other strange love in the beginning of the century entwined with the fatal history of the weird silent film… The present is always haunted by the ghosts of the past…

What is the importance of placing a memory? he said. Why spend that much time trying to find the exact geographic and temporal latitudes and longitudes of the things we remember, when what’s urgent about a memory is its essence?

Love is a capricious thing – it itself chooses its winners and its losers.

It's amazing to me that Erickson makes this novel 'work' to a degree that I could not have expected given its ambition. Realists are likely to struggle with it, there are holes everywhere that the reader needs to fill, something SF and Fantasy fans are accustomed to doing.
Like most others who rate this novel, I did not mind or even liked having what I think is reality indirectly questioned through digesting this book.

of the many books i've read in life because a boy i knew (liked) was reading it, this one turned out to be one of the better choices. completely surreal. dark. erotic. dreamy. a bizarre and fun read!

My ex-boyfriend recommended this to me and apparently I'm still taking his book recommendations. I love literary novels that take place in off-kilter worlds--here, strange climatic events such as sandstorms and shrinking seas provide the background--but I don't love when the characters themselves stop acting/reacting like real people. On almost every page a thought or image made me go, "Umm, sorry, but I don't buy that he/she's thinking that at all right now." Yes, these thoughts and images were poetic, maybe even poetically true, and maybe I've been brainwashed the past two years, but, yo, from a point-of-view perspective, this book did not work for me. It did have its moments, though, and obviously, my criticisms unfairly attack it for not being something it never purports to be, a realistic novel.

Great plot muddled by too-dense prose. Kind of 200-page book that feels like 400 with the number of pages reread.

Полтора года назад дал себе слово, что никогда больше не стану читать Стива Эриксона. И вот сегодня, спустя все это время, я уже полчаса зависаю возле его новой прочитанной книги и думал о том, какого же черта мне приспичило нарушать данное себе обещание. Пока аргумент нашелся только один. Просто на обложке русского издания романа “Дни между станциями” изображен Натан Филион, и я чисто из фэнских соображений не смог пройти в магазине мимо его портрета.

“Дни между станциями” – дебютная книга писателя, в которой мы легко можем найти все его будущие фирменнные фишки. От стихийных бедствий, вызываемых плохим настроением главной героини, и до превращенной в пластик и целлулоид эфемерной человеческой памяти. Надо при этом сразу отметить, что ничего киберпанкового и фантастического в этой книге тоже нет. Несмотря на бесконечные игры с магическим реализмом, она отвратительна правдоподобна.

Лучшая часть романа – центральная. Только она способна примирить читателя с беспомощностью и пассивностью остального текста. Самое смешное, что если начать пересказывать сюжет, то он может показаться даже интересным, хотя это будет всего лишь иллюзией. Эриксон сделал все возможное, чтобы вытравить из своей книги последние остатки интриги.

Сюжет “Дней между станциями” крутится вокруг потерянного шедевра немого кинематографа под названием “Смерть Марата”. Девяноста лет назад эту картину начал снимать молодой французский вундеркинд Адольф Сарр, который растянул работу над лентой на долгие и долгие годы. Пожирая его собственную жизнь и любовь к девушке из борделя, которую он считал собственной сестрой, Адольф так и не смог закончить свое произведение. Вот только с бегством Адольфа история его картины так и не прекратилась. Шестьдесят лет спустя родной внук режиссера Мишель Сарасан попытался найти потерянные материалы и закончить ленту. Этой цели он так и не достигнет, но зато она будет стоить ему девяти лет жизни, правого глаза и собственной памяти. (2007.02.27)

He paid his money and bought a ticket, and went into the theater and sat, alone in his row, waiting for the lights to fall and the screen to flicker for him, and he knew that it was this moment he had avoided- that if this moment were to mean nothing to him, he would have felt more utterly lost than ever, he would have felt isolated in a way the preceding days could not even imply. So it was a moment of wild exhilaration for him when, as the film began, he felt great excitement and passion. But something even more remarkable took place. The credits rolled by and he watched them carefully, something turning before his eyes, and the story started, and he remembered it. He remembered all of it.

Michel accepts what he expects to see in the not actual size cinema screen. Empty seats stretching and all of the stars could have been gold dusted to death their ages ago. Love is like when you have a painting or a song or a poem or whatever art larger than life and not actual size in your heart firing up intestinal brain noodles. Does it come out of your hands the way it is in your brain? Do they grow up and walk away and leave home? Adolphe the D.W. Griffiths of France loses his God statue sight to get it back again when he realizes that the dead are dead and defeat is its own end and destruction final and not salvageable for spare parts. Horizon view? Corner of eye view? Blind spot view? He sells his love, his would-be sister, for the sight he thinks will come to be. Lights, camera, glory. He sells out dreams for what would have beens. Everlasting, it's in the bible, it's a star on the ground (boardwalk). What do you expect to see, anyway? Lauren cannot stop hearing the voices of the past, her husband who if wishes were fishes promises, and his lover's who would blow out her birthday candle wishes with their pleading breaths if they could. Adolphe hears a laugh when Janine was raped by her brother in the brothel. Was it desperate? He can't hear because he is looking for what he thinks it meant. Dream music that goes on playing past the alarm clock's cruel whine. The expected to hear fades out will. Their love(s) is the space that what you wanted to say exists between the head and if you've got eyes to see, a mouth that speaks and a heart that whatever. My hands stopped writing before I figured out that last word.

Days Between Stations meant a lot to me because I try to live too long in that space where I expect to see that love or whatever or art or whatever come out. I expect to see things and I think I know a bit about the denial. I had a feeling off of them that it could be contagious, this ocean depths and message in a bottle (Erickson likes this motif as much as I do) giant squid heart puking its inky tentacles of doubt and backing away from new. This was my first Steve Erickson novel. I kind of loved it. I'm not sure how to describe this feeling I got off of him and the way he describes things. It's a bit like a what you expect to happen fate with not being blind and keeping enough of that want to be able to look through walls and see yellow lights, not wallpaper, eyelights and stars that's more than fate 'cause it's a dream which is hope which is maybe more. I think I'll read the rest of the books and see what else I can get. My friend Chris's review is the best and invaluable (as always). Thanks, Chris! I'm not sure I would have thought about the twin souls without it. I was too busy looking at their empty locket heart half... I would look at the movie, like Adolphe. It's always so tempting to try to capture.

Poets stutter and the visionaries are blind.


P.s. I liked reading about the silent films again. What I knew about the silent film era came mostly from a Lillian Gish biography (not good because the author diminished her contributions and had a creepy agenda about doing so that I still don't understand) I read in the early '00s (she's my favorite, along with Buster Keaton. I used to want to be him) and the illuminating (and enjoyable as hell) City of Nets by Otto Friedrich. It's going to be hard not to skip to Zeroville for the film stuff. It was nice to get some of that film excitement back when reading this. I haven't felt that in a long while. Oh yeah, I don't know anything about forgetting to live 'cause you're playing your part... (I used to like silent film actresses as much as I like messages in bottles now.)