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Book Reviewed by:In the year 2021, a brother and sister make a cross-country pilgrimage to the Badlands of South Dakota, where the Twin Towers have suddenly reappeared - and Elvis Presley's stillborn twin brother has inexplicably reawakened.
When the Twin Towers suddenly reappear in the Badlands of South Dakota twenty years after their fall, nobody can explain their return. To the hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands drawn to the "American Stonehenge" - including Parker and Zema, siblings on their way from L.A. to visit their mother in Michigan - the Towers seem to sing, even as everybody hears a different song. A rumor overtakes the throng that someone can be seen in the high windows of the southern structure.
On the ninety-third floor, Jesse Presley - the stillborn twin of the most famous singer who ever lived - suddenly awakes, driven mad over the hours and days to come by a voice in his head that sounds like his but isn't, and by the memory of a country where he survived in his brother's place. Meanwhile, Parker and Zema cross a possessed landscape by a mysterious detour no one knows, charted on a map that no one has seen.
Haunting, audacious, and undaunted, Shadowbahn is a winding and reckless ride through intersections of danger, destiny, and the conjoined halves of a ruptured nation.
One
Shenandoah
Things don't just appear into thin--
... but she hangs up on him before he finishes. "What the ... ?" he says, staring at his cell phone in dismay and trying to remember if she ever hung up on him before. As he finishes filling the tank of his truck and replaces the pump's nozzle, Aaron ponders how this became the kind of argument where his wife hangs up on him. He hauls himself back up into the driver's seat thinking maybe this is really the kind of argument that's about something other than what it's about.
Startinghe u the ignition, turning down the oldies station on the radio, he sits a minute irritably checking the rearview mirror. An- other truck waits for him to pull away from the pump. Aaron remembers that he meant to get a donut and Red Bull from the gas station's convenience market, some concentrated discharge of sugar and caffeine to take him the rest of the way to Rapid City.
The unnamed song
He looks at his cell to see if she's texted. "Fuck if I'm ...
Am I the only person who does this?
...me by Solvej Balle Flesh by David Szalay Flashlight by Susan Choi Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa The Original by Nell Stevens A Burning by Megha Majumdar Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson Audition by Katie Kitamura Erasure by Percival Everett These are the books I've purchased in the past six months that I haven't gotten around to yet.
-kim.kovacs
In both plotlines, two very bleak worlds are gestured at—in the former, rock and roll doesn't exist; in the latter, sandstorms consume Los Angeles and large swaths of America have joined the separatist state of Disunion—but at no point does Erickson bog himself down with worldbuilding... What matters is the sense that we've collectively gotten off on the wrong exit...continued
Full Review
(580 words)
(Reviewed by Joe Hoeffner).
Christopher Sorrentino, author of Trance and The Fugitives
Written in the margins of the American songbook and in the shadows of the Twin Towers, Shadowbahn devastatingly, perceptively, brilliantly shows how inseparable cultural history and the kind of history written in blood really are. Dana Spiotta
In Shadowbahn, Erickson combines the social novel, the science fiction novel, the pop music essay, the comedic set piece, and the family novel into a wild, idiosyncratic tour de force. Mark Z. Danielewski, author of The Familiar
A great, great, great, great novel. I could say more - about its big-world heartedness and old-world shadowness, about twins and towers, brothers and sisters, road trips and all the borders we design and transgress, and of course Erickson's beautiful heart-bit music - but it would still add up to the same thing: great. Sung, of course. Sarah Vowell
Not sure whether Steve Erickson's off-kilter whoppers have gotten more plausible or the country gets more and more unhinged. He and his book's bewitching nouns, from the Badlands to "La Bamba," are good company either way.Laurie Anderson's "O Superman" is a song caught between centuries. Released in 1981, it appears to have traces of postwar optimism—optimism about technology, about institutions, about one's own country—but those traces are weaponized, suffused with an icy dread for what's to come. "Here come the planes," Anderson warns, her vocoded voice simultaneously warm and cold, before she tries to save face like a robot flight attendant reassuring her passengers when the engines fail. "They're American planes," she chirps, "made in America! Smoking or non-smoking?" Twenty years later, the planes would come (American planes, made in America), and Anderson would perform the song at The Town Hall in New York City, just days after the Twin ...
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