Steve Erickson Biography

American novelist, born in Santa Monica, California, educated at the University of California at Los Angeles. Erickson wrote the ‘Guerilla Pop’ column for the Los Angeles Reader for three years, also writing for Esquire and Rolling Stone, and has worked as a freelance editor and writer in Europe and Los Angeles. His first novel, Days between Stations (1985), is a tale about Lauren and Michel's search for the latter's identity in a bleak futuristic setting, and establishes Erickson's shifting, surrealistic, near-cinematic style. A similar path, through a blend of science fiction, political fable, and fantastic love story is followed in his next novel Rubicon Beach (1986), in which the slippage of names and identities reinforces the dream-like narrative structure. Tours of the Black Clock (1989) combines past and future, history and fantasy in a narrative where Banning Jain-light becomes Adolf Hitler's pornographer. Leap Year (1989) is his account of the 1988 American presidential election and a parallel narrative about an eighteenth-century woman who chose to remain a slave to Thomas Jefferson in Paris in 1789. Among his recent novels is Arc d'X (1993). Erickson's work has received wide acclaim as examples of post-modern fiction, especially from such peers as Thomas Pynchon.