Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2017
320 pages
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Publication Information
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.
"Starred Review. Think Philip K. Dick on smoother acid and with a more up-to-date soundtrack, and you've got something of this eminently strange, thoroughly excellent book." - Kirkus
"Unusually structured and daringly written, Erickson's gem of a novel is equally challenging and rewarding, spinning out thread after thread of story before skillfully tying them together in a satisfying climax." - Publishers Weekly
"Erickson's many fans, which include such literary lights as Jonathan Lethem and Thomas Pynchon, will find plenty of narrative gems and symbolism here to savor and contemplate." - Booklist
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." - Mark Z. Danielewski, author of The Familiar
"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." - Christopher Sorrentino, author of Trance and The Fugitives
"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." - Dana Spiotta
"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." - Sarah Vowell
This information about Shadowbahn was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Steve Erickson is the author of nine other novels (including Zeroville, Our Ecstatic Days, and These Dreams of You) and two nonfiction books that have been published in ten languages. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals, such as Esquire, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian, American Prospect, and Los Angeles, for which he writes regularly about film, music, and television. Erickson is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Currently he teaches at the University of California, Riverside.
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