This is the sort of book where, around chapter two you start thinking to yourself, "I bet a midget is going to turn up in here at some point." I don't think a midget ever actually shows but D. W. Griffith does make an appearance. It took me a while to get into the somwhat dense style of the prose, but in the end I enjoyed the book more than I thought I would. For fans of the films of Guy Maddin.

I don't know about this one. For the first few pages I thought the language was far too ornate and overwrought, but I seem to have got used to it by the end. Overall I liked it, I think, though the extreme weather confused me (Is it now? Is it the future? How can Paris be freezing but it's so hot in Italy?)

Discovering Steve Erickson's writing has been one of the great surprises of this year. I first read "Zeroville" which is his most recent work and what may be positioning him for a larger audience... Probably his most accessible. This is his first... strikingly similar in many ways. Different in many others. Reading both one gets the sense that Erickson feels the larger body of his work is all interconnected. Characters and scenes drift from novel to novel just as they do across centuries and oceans within a single. As I suspected, a browse through the most recent book reveals, Michel Sarre, one of the central figures in DBS indeed appears in Zeroville. Each universe is the alternate of the previous. Hauntingly beautiful, at times both surreal and lucid, characters seek lost love, memories, lives and cling to each other with tragic perfection. His lovers are erotic, violent, compulsive, addicted. Characters seek to create, or re-create, or to tame their passions and visions; to find the lost pieces of themselves that have been scattered throughout time and space, page to page. Another reviewer mentions the term (genre?) "slipstream" to describe his writings, and other similar authors like Murakami, William Gibson. In my mind I see a correlation to filmmakers like David Lynch (especially his recent films.) As in dreams, action moves from reality to fantasy seamlessly. Characters seem to split and fracture, while at other times, the same person seems to inexplicably be in two places at once, indeed one person can simply become another. Ultimately though, the stylish devices are merely that, and Erickson's real strength comes in his characters and storytelling - epic yet always intimate, poignant and heartbreakingly sad.

This is probably my favorite book of all time.

7/5/10

Ok, that was just weird. I was going through my backlog of friend requests when I stumbled upon my new booknerd friend Michael's very awesome review of this book. So yes he is now my friend, and then I went to read more about the book itself. And the weird thing is how when you look at people's books sorted by review, it doesn't show the author of the book, right? So I didn't realize until a few more clicks that this is written by the same guy who wrote Zeroville, which I am reading right now and absolutely adoring. So fuck, that's some cool synchronicity and I guess I'm supposed to read this right away.

Daring, haunting, sensual...

If, like me, you think that the words "magical" and "surreal" are tossed around far too often, then this is the book to read to prove to yourself that such adjectives do sometimes deserve a place on a jacket blurb. A tour-de-force. Absolutely unmissable.

Of Erickson’s novels his debut isn’t my favorite—Zeroville was too perfect—but this is nevertheless a beautifully written, heartbreaking, delirious, dreamlike apocalyptic masterpiece.

Poetic, surreal backdrop that was enjoyable world building. However, the characters fell flat. The poetry that built the world at the beginning felt lazy at the end, as though it was being dictated to me rather than unraveling before me.

It was extremely moving and delightfully strange. Immediately upon finishing, I felt the urge to read it again. This one will stick with you.

Beautiful prose. And cats, lots of cats. I'm looking forward to reading another book by this author.

For this review, I had to lift my self-imposed ban on amazing. Neither a dictionary nor a thesaurus yielded any other word with just the right nuances to describe this novel. So, here it is: Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations is amazing.

He invents strange and wonderful characters. He plots with ingenuity and originality. He writes phrases in vivid, provocative, dreamlike, even hallucinatory prose. His juxtaposes words and sentences in unexpected ways.

What is truly amazing is his presentation of characters and places as if they belong to a world that is actually a film. Reality is composed of light, movement, swatches of color, which are rendered in two dimensions, but perceived as being in three. Rivers and oceans disappear. Strange fogs create a miasmic vision. The Seine freezes solid. Visions are portrayed as actuality in ways that only a movie--or a dream--allows. His is a world of illusion and allusion. It makes you doubt reality.