Author of the week

last updated 8 January 2015

A lifetime of watching movies may have finally provided cult novelist Steve Erickson with the key to wider success, said Drew Toal in Time Out New York. Over a 22-year novel-writing career, the 57-year-old Los Angeles magazine film critic has consistently enjoyed the enthusiastic backing of Thomas Pynchon and other big-name postmodernists. But Erickson’s seventh novel, Our Ecstatic Days, sold only a couple thousand copies in hardcover in 2005, forcing him to bring out his latest effort, Zeroville, as a modestly priced paperback original. Zeroville, however, bears little resemblance to the surrealistic fever dreams Erickson has produced before. “I wanted to follow the narrative laws of a movie,” he says. “To be linear, always in the present tense, the story told through dialogue and action.”

Erickson insists that his story of a tattooed film buff arriving in Easy Rider–era Hollywood is different than the typical Hollywood novel. “Those tend to be about how movies get made,” he says. “I wanted to write about how movies become part of the modern nervous system, the dream language we all converse in from time to time.” Some of the more fantastic turns in Zeroville are hard to follow, said Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times. But we can’t expect Erickson to go mainstream all at once. To him, even the story’s deeply unconventional ending is utterly logical. “It’s the conclusion the book has been heading toward since the opening paragraph,” he says. “You just have to pay attention.”