1Q1A Steve Erickson Shadowbahn

What this episode covers

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Steve Erickson author of Shadowbahn, just published last week by Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin. Steve is the author of ten novels, including (some of my favorites) Days Between Stations, Tours of the Black Clock, Arc d’X, Amnesiascope and Zeroville. He’s written for everyone---Esquire, Rolling Stone, Salon, NYT Magazine. He’s received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and a grant from the NEA. I used to think that Steve’s books dealt with an alternative universe that somehow ran parallel to my own waking day-to-day reality. Given the recent troubles, I now feel that Steve’s new novel presents a more logical version of reality than the one I currently find myself in. I find it more likely that the twin towers reappear in the South Dakota badlands along with Elvis’ stillborn brother than I do that Steve Bannon is our new Cromwell and Sean Spicer spins the world weekly news, and the (Betsy Devoss) Tupperware queen is distributing the royal jelly of our educational resources to our youngsters. Nonetheless it is true. The novel begins with the towers reappearing 20 years after their felling and in the upper floors (the 93rd to be exact) Jesse Presley finds himself alive, a life that had previously gone unrealized. He doesn’t quite live up to certain standards however and due to that in part, the music we should have grown up on is not what it should be. Not often that you read a book that references: The Dead, The Doors, Hendrix, The Flatlanders, The Velvet Underground, Missy Elliot, The White Stripes, Aretha and Fredi Washington, to name (really!!) but a few. To steal Steve’s (and Ralph Ellison’s) epigraph we can either live with music or die with noise and I sure as hell would rather spend my last years with a soundtrack. Shadowbahn posits one of a myriad of futures, a future in which a divided America lives out a timescape in which the names Kennedy, Lennon and Presley carry different connotations and the most amazing thing about the book as I alluded to earlier, is that you feel you can hitch the caboose of the novel to another car that is the train that plummets down the track of this new and really really scary America.

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