Steve Erickson's genre-defying fiction can be as enthralling and difficult as his city—via Scott Timberg, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer.

It was only a day or two into the worst of the Southern California fires, and novelist Steve Erickson had just packed the car up so his family could flee their Topanga Canyon house.

They ended up staying put, watching from home the flames that could have been raging from a page of one of his novels. In Erickson's L.A., an unexplained sandstorm, the sudden emergence of an enormous lake in the center of the city and other unannounced breaches of time and space occur almost casually.

The surrealism of his novels is all the more powerful for its occasional overlap with the reality of life here. "L.A. has always lent itself to that, to the sense that it's not an altogether natural place to live," said Erickson, 57, recalling the fires at a clamorous eatery at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where he wrote and set parts of "Zeroville," his latest novel. "That at any moment nature, or chaos, will turn on you."

With seven previous novels, written over more than 20 years, Erickson has established a reputation as a daring, lyrical writer with a strong following among other novelists and a distinctive brand of cultural taste: West Coast, genre-bending and earnestly experimental. He also expresses some of that taste through running the quietly influential journal Black Clock, published at the California Institute of the Arts. Yet he is still in some ways unjustifiably obscure.

To read the rest of Erickson's article, click here.

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Recommend this article...