Tours of the Black Clock

The course of a century is rewritten in this fabulously warped odyssey, named a best book of the year by the New York Times Tours of the Black Clock is a wild dream of the twentieth century as told by the ghost of Banning Jainlight. After a disturbing family secret is unearthed, Jainlight throws his father out of a window and burns down the Pennsylvania ranch where he grew up. He escapes to Vienna where he is commissioned to write pornography for a single customer identified as "Client X," which alters the trajectory of World War II. Eventually Jainlight is accompanied by an aged and senile Adolf Hitler back to America, where both men pursue the same lover. Tours of the Black Clock is a story in which history and the laws of space and time are unforgettably transformed.

About the Author :
Steve Erickson is the acclaimed author of several novels, including Amnesiascope, Rubicon Beach, and Days Between Stations. Regarded as a central figure in the avant-pop movement, movement, Erickson has been compared to J. G. Ballard and Don DeLillo, and praised by Thomas Pynchon, for his deeply imaginative fiction. In addition to his novels, he has published two works of nonfiction about American politics and culture and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. The recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is presently the film critic for Los Angeles magazine and editor of the literary journal Black Clock.

Review :
"If fabulous new novels were Daylight Saving Time, Tours of the Black Clock would be the twenty-first of June. When the sun finally sets on this mind-ripping performance, the stars are afraid to come out." --Tom Robbins "Brilliant, mesmerizing, a dazzling achievement that successfully challenges the conventions of fiction. You don't read Tours of the Black Clock so much as surrender to the dizzying stream that rushes past conventional boundaries, straight into the wounded lives of its characters." --The Atlanta Journal-Constitution "A brutal, visionary novel that charges like a blind steed, Tours of the Black Clock takes on the Twentieth Century as its god and enemy. In Erickson's apocalyptic vision, the very scroll of history has set itself on fire." --The Boston Globe "Erickson's finest novel. Its closing chapters are among the most powerful and haunting in recent American fiction." --Interview "Magnificent, haunting, a rare and original novel." --The New York Times "Erickson has traveled more visionary terrain than most writers explore in a lifetime. Tours of the Black Clock continues that journey in spectacular fashion with a scope and ambition that makes its predecessors seem like parlor games." --San Francisco Chronicle "A novel that declares a major writer in our midst. Pynchon, Nabokov, DeLillo -- Steve Erickson has approached their heights." --The Wall Street Journal