This is truly a remarkable read. Steve Erickson's style is lyrical and pulls you in, the book is difficult to put down.

A second-rate "Perfume."

The Believer says that Erickson's a master of defamiliarizing us from our worlds; how this differs from say, science fiction or fantasy is that Erickson purposefully creates a fully realistic world like our own, just slightly askew. This is a risk inasmuch as it was for the Latin American Magic Realists (who I could never get into): what is your dividing line between reality and fantasy? If your characters exist in a world recognizable to any reader, then any diversion from this will reassert the novel's existence as artifice. This is all well and good (and can be very good, as in David Mitchell's  Cloud Atlas), but what it sacrificed is pathos for the characters.
tAnd so while I admired Days Between Stations for its novel take on film history and the limits/commonalities between film and memory, I found several of the book's elements highly problematic. His characters were all self-possessed in an almost narcissistic way, which would've been less noticeable if Erickson hadn't exercised capital-P (& F) Pathetic Fallacy in every scene. There is a high level of purposeful vagueness throughout, as if this world contained only descriptions, never answers.
It's fitting that  Thomas Pynchon has a blurb on the cover; Stations is a direct descendent of  V. Both books hop the globe and dwell on people searching for something they cannot quite name or discern, and both make room for the influence of art on our lives and our ability to live them. However, Pynchon's stylistic fireworks are exchanged for an intense look at the protagonists' emotional terrain. This is unfortunate, as long passages of the book come off as almost purple prose, and the many sex scenes as romance-novel fodder (coupling on the Rialto Bridge in Venice, anyone? Did I mention the fog?).
This, much like Tom McCarthy's  Remainder, gets to the very heart of my literary taste. I can recognize the immense talents of the author and even feel that his conceit is near-genius. But the execution is deeply, deeply irritating—I think with every page, "Fuck, if only I had thought of this first, I would have done it this way and it would've been great!" ...Then again, Adorno says we should have just such an unpleasant reaction to the art which truly challenges us, which might be a very large backhanded compliment. I dunno. I should probably reread this in ten years.

Pretty effing cool.