Existential entropy is the dominant theme of Steve Erickson’s sixth book, a meditation on the persistence of memory, the disappearance of the real, and the no-man’s-land between fact and imagination.
With limber, hypnotic prose and vivid imagery, the nameless narrator leads us through a landscape of paranoia, sex, and decay. Though this no-man’s-land takes the shape of L.A. early in the next century, the novel’s axes are psychology and identity, not society and technology.
One of the narrator’s obsessions is what he calls the Cinema of
Hysteria: “movies that make no sense at all — and we understand them completely.” Similarly, this tale seems plotless; but, as in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the arbitrary oddities slowly coalesce into a haunting whole. Erickson has spun a cunning web — less a book of laughter and forgetting than a seductive insomniac nightmare of hysteria and amnesia.
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