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----- Original Message ----- From: "MJ Walker" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Thursday, August 10, 2006 8:29 AM Subject: Re: "Innocence" > Very interesting, Fred - I haven't read H. but am now tempted to try, and > as far as graphic novels are concerned have only recently started reading > Gaiman's Lord Morpheus series. Recommendations, please. Nor have I ever > read a word by Steve Erickson - which one do you recommend to start with? > There a very charming interview here that I just googled- Thanks for the interview, Martin -- Erickson has a cult following but does not get nearly enough press. Tours of the Black Clock is my favorite also. It presents the 20th century as a board game, which one can enter at any point, move back and forth, and create alternate outcomes - in which, say, Venice is covered with blue plastic tarp, or the Wehrmacht procures Colombian virgins for a drooling Hitler's lust. The style is such that saying this gives nothing whatever away. Arc d'X is also very great. I can't remember The Sea Came In At Midnight, only that it impressed me while I was reading it. E is as far as I know the only working Surrealist novelist in English. I keep thinking of the 1930s paintings of the Englishman Paul Nash - esp. his image of a sea invading a room, becoming a room. The new one, Our Ecstatic Days, also uses this, and is intensely focused and almost unbearably poignant. Not linear prose - dream logic, sometimes connecting with a vast collective dream. It sucks you down rather than allowing you to read it, and many readers I think shy away from it. His great "subject" is Los Angeles, which invites, even requires, this sort of treatment.