I WAS A PORNOGRAPHER FOR HITLER! My name is Banning Jainlight. I write fiction, specially tailored fiction: pulp sex American adventure stories. I write them for a very specific clientele. These clients, these monsters, they come into my life and I enter into theirs. Am I a monster, am I their fellow monster, their comrade-in-arms? My birth was monstrous, and I dealt with my monstrous family as they deserved - monstrously, as their own monster. I fled to New York; I fled to Europe. To Hitler'

I never fail to enjoy postmodern history... In the postmodernist’s hands history unavoidably turns into a farce – however dark but farce anyhow.I also knew such a version of the Twentieth Century was utterly counterfeit. That neither the rule of evil nor its collapse could be anything but an aberration in such a century... in which the black clock of the century is stripped of hands and numbers. A time in which there’s no measure of time that God understands: in such a time memories mean nothing...

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 t...

I discovered Steve Erickson thanks to a review of Zeroville in Rain Taxi. Zeroville was a minor revelation; I wanted to foist it upon every novel-reading person I came across for the next couple months. I found an author new to me with a substantial back catalog worth seeking out. A couple years later I bought Tours of the Black Clock at Myopic Bookstore in Chicago. If you ever find yourself in the middle of the country, check it out. It's a good used bookstore, and just down the street from Qui...

Time shifts and contorts. Ripped open by a single artist, Banning Jainlight alters the regular course of time in his role as personal erotica-writer to Der Fuhrer when he somehow captures the specular image of his now-dead love obsession, niece Geli Raubal. As Jainlight’s writing reignites Hitler’s obsession, it changes the course of the war, causing unstable peace with Russia while England falls to the Germans.It’s hard to write about Erickson’s works because the use dream-logic in ways that el...

Spanning an entire era and grappling with the pivotal crises and conscience of the 20th century, this is almost overwhelming in scope and ambition, an oblique secret history / remythololizing / psychiatric case history of a world in bedlam, spun with a pulp precision belying its beautifully formed turns of phrase and piercing images. However, Erickson's reach here may exceed core coherency. The actual primary narrative is a kind of conflation of The Man in the High Castle with The Entity: parall...

Marking the first appearance of Davenhall Island, a mysterious and isolated rock accessible to mainland America only by ferry, Tours of the Black Clock opens with the local town prostitute's son, Marc, yearning to become the next ferryman. As the island is lapped by the mystical waters of Erickson's phantom earth, the ferryman-aspirant conjures up the ghost of the improbably-named Banning Jainlight, formerly the chief pornographer of der Führer and subtle influencer of the course of Second World...

"The hymen of feeling worn away like innocence."An exemplary quote for this novel, not in meaning, of course, but in its excruciating, exhausting drive to become something it can't quite be.The plot, which has confused far better readers than me, can be broken down like this, in a like, exemplary way:A hick with an enormous penis writes porn for Hitler and creates an alternate timeline for the niece-obsessed Fuhrer. Now, there's a lot to read into that and a few academic people have done so with...

Aside from Gravity's Rainbow, this has one of the most resonant opening lines I've read. There's a fable-like quality to all of Steve Erickson's books - really elegant sentences that follow elliptical paths - that makes the kinds of connections only accessible in altered states. Although his other novels do this to a greater extent, the post-apocalyptic worlds, he creates have a really heavy sense of atmosphere that remind me of even sadder versions of Bellona in Stephen Donaldson's Dhalgren. If...

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

For some unfathomable reason - and no doubt also to other devotees of his early novels - Erickson has gained only a small readership, although he has garnered some impressive reviews by a number of critics both in the US and Europe. Sadly, I just don't think Erickson has ever been marketed or promoted properly or with any real understanding of how amazing and original novelist he is.`Tours of the Black Clock' is his third novel, and should have been the key to his literary stardom; his `breakout...

A twilight trip to an alternative version of the 20th Century Steve Erickson claims kinship with authors Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon, and its easily to see why. Like those authors, he subtly twists the nature of reality and history until it resembles the inner (both philosophical and psychological) landscapes of his characters. This novel is about white-haired Marc and his mother, who live on a small island in the middle of a fog-shrouded river in the Pacific Northwest. They have an estran...

Steve Erickson should be much more famous than he is, at least as famous as, say, Haruki Murakami, a writer he has a fair amount in common with, in particular Murakami's Wind Up Bird Chronicles or Kafka On The Shore. His stories are always unstuck in time and place, there is this theme that all history is happening at the same time. It's in this one, Zeroville, The Sea Came in At Midnight, Arc D'X... All his books put together in a row feel like a single epic in Erickson world, like the worlds o...

Let's be honest: the plot does not satisfy the hunger for a story. Somehow, the language holds you to the viscera of the text, igniting the hope in your mind that on the last page it will all make sense. It doesn't, as it should (rather shouldn't) if one is to read an intriguing and truly historical novel. Truly, meaning not in the least, and the point is just that, there is no point. Not a starting one and certainly not narratively speaking. Read this without an agenda, because it will destroy

I didn't really like this the first time I read it. But there was just something about Erickson's writing, and I tried another book by him. Now he's one of my favorite writers. I liked this one a lot more my second time.

this summer i get to write about this book for 40 glorious pages.i have no idea exactly what i'm gonna say yet but in effect it will amount to:steve erickson i this summer i get to write about this book for 40 glorious pages.i have no idea exactly what i'm gonna say yet but in effect it will amount to:steve erickson i <3 you. ...more

Damnit, now I have to read Zeroville, though fortunately not as stylistic research for my next writing project, despite having little interest in its subject matter, on account of its seeming to be his passion project, though there's a lot of what I assume to be channeling of personal grief at and general wrestling with the 20th Century here. Parts of it are almost truly great, but there's also a great deal of pointless and lazy genrefuckery, stemming I, would assume, from what gave Zeroville li...

All the stars

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 su...

It's not often that I say this, but I was fairly confused with this read. The story begins with Marc, a man who has foresaken his village and mother upon discovering a dead body at her feet. He travels everyday to the village via boat, acting as a means of transportation for visitors to the island, never leaving the boat on these frequent trips. When he sees a beautiful young girl who travels on his boat to the island never to come back for the return trip, he is lured off the boat to visit his

This was a beautiful read - Erickson's prose is like a mix of Philip K Dick and Toni Morrison. This is an excellent example of magical realism - the relationship between Banning Jainlight, Client Z, and Dania is gripping in its intensity, and it didn't particularly bother me as the reader that there was some sort of magic involved.I have only two complains:1. (view spoiler)[I'm not sure what's gained from exploring this alternate history where Adolf Hitler doesn't pursue Barbarossa. Obviously, i...

An extraordinary and audacious book about the nightmare of the twentieth century, a novel of stories within stories interlocked in shapes that cannot be adequately described. A meditation on the nature of fiction, history, time, and reality itself. At the center of it all is Banning Jainlight, one of the strangest, most fascinating characters in modern fiction. A hulking man capable of extreme violence, he is at times lucid, at times deranged, and narrates with a maniacal sense of humor. Central...

A difficult book. Fascinating, but at times hard to follow. Not my favourite Erickson (that would be The Sea Came in at Midnight). Interesting look on the Twentieth Century and the nature and humanity of evil. The book is very much about Hitler, but the perspective is fresh.

I'm a fan of Erickson's Zeroville and enjoy him much more when he's referencing film a little more directly. Here we get windows and war and large Third Man silhouettes on the streets of Vienna, but I found myself nodding off. Also, the ripple effect of men's boners on history and the fabric of space and time really doesn't interest me. If I'd read Gravity's Rainbow, I'd get all pretentious and say 'Pynchon does it better.' Bummer.

Probably one of the best books I've read this year or any year for that matter...

Say you're a young person hard on your luck. Maybe you killed someone, committed arson, and fled to a major city to live anonymously on the streets during the Great Depression. Then you get your big break. You're a published author! And one patron whose identity remains unknown can't get enough of your ham-fisted erotica, and is willing to pay for it. You're off the streets! Things are looking up! Until you learn that Hitler's your patron. Yep, that Hitler. You're Captain Evil's personal smut gu...

A winding, surreal novel where people, space, and time are fluid. It opens with a sublime section involving Marc, who becomes the boatman of a ferry between his small island home of Davenhall and the mainland. The tale of his existential tumult, featuring beautiful imagery of him crossing back-and-forth over the river in an ever-present fog, as well as a quest for a girl in a blue coat, could function as its own short story or novella. Instead, we're transported to the narrative of the main prot...

As this book slowed toward its end, I began to think of it as the opposite of a love note--a hate note--to Adolf Hitler. It appeared to be the 19th century's hateful serenade to its most hate-filled citizen. Yet further than that, this turned out to be not the case. This book is far more human than that. It is just as dark, yet just as human as "the small miserable life of an old senile memoryless man" (257). It is as dreary as it is compelling; as seductive as watching evil suffer. It is someth...

First re-read - July 09 after finishing the book in March 08, needs another re-read to fully make sense, but this time the story of Banning Jainlight and Dania from split universes, one a pornographer for Client Z whose writings about Dania are seen by Z as being about the love of his life Geli and send history on a careening course, the other a Russian exile and dancer for whom men literally die for started cohering better; still a masterpiece of dark imagination with mesmeric writing that you

Really dug this at the time. Was this the one about Hitler's pornographer? Can't remember ...