Days Between Stations

by Steve Erickson

Book Overview

A fragment of a film, a young woman's face are the only clues in a man's search for his pastfrom hallucinatory Los Angeles where the freeways are buried in sand and dust storms obscure the sun to a Paris where the lights have gone out and bonfires burn in the streets. Lives intercut with each other and past joins future in a seamless flow, while the present remains elusive and fleeting. Steve Erickson's hypnotic, first novel is a dreamscape where...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394746856
• ISBN13: 9780394746852
• Release Date: August 1986
• Publisher: Vintage Books USA
• Length: 253 Pages
• Weight: 0.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.1" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

A deep first novel

Like other writers who cross their hard-edged fiction with elements of surrealism and sci-fi, Steve Erickson keeps you guessing about the realities and invites you into a world of motives. The three main characters are living through a world cataclysm, which only heightened my interest in them. Jason, a professional cyclist, moves from race to race, and affair to affair, with no thought towards his wife, who falls in love with an amnesiac stranger, Michel. I know it sounds like a soap opera, but no soap could implore the sensual depth in Erickson's writing, or give the book such a sad and longing ending. A great place to start reading Erickson's work.

Must Read for Screenwriters

Erickson championed cinemagraphic-styled narrative through all of his works but especially in Days Between Stations. As contemporary screenwriters venture to adopt powerful time inversions and thread their viewer's consiousness through the colorful tapestries of the subconcscious, works such as Erickson's should find their way to the top of any required list of literary influence.Days Between Stations has special potency for screenwriters because of its inclusion of light and film as subject matter in the sub-plot of the story.

Steve Erickson 101

The cult of Steve Erickson consists of thousands of unafilliated readers, all eagerly awaiting Erickson's next novel, and wondering if the next one will finally completely batter down the door that exists between our waking consciousness and dream states of dark beauty and erotic potential. Days Between Stations is a fine first novel that will hook those with a predilection towards exploration of the creative subconscious and who are aware of and embrace the shadow that exists in all of us. As with all first novels a seam shows here and there. Unlike most first novels, this read becomes a portal through which the reader passes to advance to the writer's next level of development. It is an initiation into the genre of Erickson. The novel, dreamlike and surrealistic, folds adventure into fictional events that are original and apocalyptic in scope. In Days Between Stations the reader is transported to a world mysteriously overwhelmed by blowing sands, moonlit nights, and surrealistic journeys To places we all visit in our dreams. In a way any attempt to describe a Steve Erickson story misses the point. Try Days Between Stations and you too may realize that somehow you have become a secret unafilliated member of the cult of Steve Erickson.

days between breathing

well that would be true if it had taken me more than a day to read the thing. truth be told i wolfed it in 4 and a half hours, and was palpitating the whole way. i've never read a book that worked so well on so many levels - my heart was with Michel the whole way through, and my head was reeling from the twisted skein of time that swept me along. the scene with michel taking a lifelong train journey was the most powerful descriptions of threatened love and identity i have ever read, and haunts me still. read this book - your life will be better for it. after i'd finished reading it i had to write an essay on it, as i couldn't find a single other essay on steve erickson, so now he's officially the subject of my dissertation, but after i'd finished that i ordered half a dozen copies and distributed them to everyone i knew who needed to read this book. and although i don't know you - this means you too.

Like a trip on a controlled substance, but more real.

Reading one of Erickson' books is like entering a surreal dreamscape. His prose is lyrical and his vision and sensitivity startling. This is perhaps the most important book to me personally, that I have ever read. I love the way he plays with time to create paralell universes. I love his vision that time is like a river and can meander around but, in the end, reunifies itself. Underscores the old axiom that everything turns out the way it is supposed to.