BookBrowse Reviews Shadowbahn by Steve Erickson

BookBrowse:

Shadowbahn's high concept premise is a jumping-off point for an eerie, singular vision of a fractured world.

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One day, without warning, the Twin Towers reappear in the Badlands of South Dakota. This inexplicable event briefly unifies a country that has collapsed into disunion, but not for very long. Soon enough, questions arise. Where did the towers come from, if they came from anywhere at all? Why do the towers seem to play music, a different song for every visitor? And who is the mysterious figure some people claim to see in a window on the 93rd floor?

If you're expecting satisfying answers to these questions, Steve Erickson's 2017 novel Shadowbahn may leave you wanting. Anyone who's read 2007's Zeroville knows that Erickson is not one for straightforward narratives and tidy resolutions. Instead, Shadowbahn offers a bleak, surreal, yet somehow hopeful evocation of a country (and by extension, a world) that has been falling apart since the beginning.

The novel follows two parallel narratives, fitting for a story so preoccupied with twins and doubles. The first involves the man on the 93rd floor, who turns out to be one Jesse Garon Presley—a man from an alternate universe in which he, and not his twin brother Elvis, survived childbirth. Driven mad by frequent reminders of his anomalous existence, including a record sung by his dead brother given to him by an antisocial British expat once known as John Lennon, he sets out to destroy all music.

The second narrative follows Parker and Zema, a pair of siblings (Parker white, Zema Black) who embark on a road trip across the country, which has been fractured after the election of a Black president. Their trip is fraught: the two of them bicker over the past, including Parker's childish attempt to emancipate himself as a teenager after his parents adopted Zema from Ethiopia, and deal with the ambient threat of racism, which may but never fully does boil over into violence. And that's all before it turns out their car, playing a playlist made by their late father, is the only remaining source of music in America.

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. It's not important why John F. Kennedy lost the 1960 presidential election in Jesse's universe, nor why he became a regular at Andy Warhol's Factory a few years later. What matters is the sense that we've collectively gotten off on the wrong exit.

"If we shift Churchill or Lincoln off their place on the timeline by a hundred kilometers…everything turns out differently," Kennedy tells Jesse. But there's no "right timeline," and there's no "wrong timeline" either. There are only different timelines, both of which ultimately lead to a similar place. "As the twentieth century was about politics, which is to say survival," Erickson writes later, "the twenty-first is about God, which is to say oblivion."

Needless to say, Shadowbahn is not a breezy beach read. A sense of doom hovers over the proceedings from the first pages, where "Summer Wine" on the radio reminds a truck driver that "these are the last days of summer, nine days before the fall." But as cliche as it is to say, the presence of shadows implies the presence of light. That light could be music; or a closer relationship with your sister; or a better understanding of your father. Whatever the source, it's there. 

This review first ran in the November 5, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.