ERICKSON, Steve

   Working name of US writer Stephen Michael Erickson (1950-), active as a journalist for some years before his first novel, Days Between Stations (1985), quickly established his reputation as an author of dark, journey-haunted, surreal FABULATIONS about the USA and the 20th century. Labyrinthine figurations of apocalypse dominate his grey and hyperbolic landscapes; but a powerful sense of geography, notable also in the first Surrealists, gives each of his novels a local habitation. Days Between Stations, set mainly on an allegorically split river, features the attempts of two sensually linked people to make sense of their pasts; Rubicon Beach (1986) is a more specific allegory of the USA, as are Tours of the Black Clock (1989) and the semidocumentary Leap Year (1989). Arc d'X (1993) traces the consequences of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a black slave who becomes his mistress, through a variety of ALTERNATE WORLDS, at least one of which is described through scenes set in 1999. Although sf instruments sometime protrude through the texture of these tales, they are in no telling sense works of genre.

   JC