Tours of the Black Clock
Steve Erickson
Time Warner Futura trade paperback, 320 pages, £4.50
Published June 1990
ISBN 0708847528
Review by David Clark (1990)

How seriously seriously weird. Steve Erickson’s third peculiar novel plays strange games with time and reality. Tours of the Black Clock describes an alternative universe, beginning – after a long intro involving an archetypal ferryman figure and set partly on a small island in a river – with a tale told by a ghost, Banning Jainlight, a pulp writer who specialised in porn. Hired by a mysterious German to write fantasy to his specifications, Jainlight turns out to have been procured to write for Hitler as official pornographer. Hitler gets Jainlight to write about his niece Geli Raubal, presented here as the only girl Hitler really loved (in our version of the century, she was shot dead in 1931, possibly by her own hand, possibly not). It’s these stories that seem to get Hitler going in the first place.

Geli haunts Tours of the Black Clock, appearing and reappearing to different characters like some kind of spectre at different points in the century. As the book goes on things get worse. The black clock counts down, and darkness spreads. The Nazis overrun Europe and World War 2 becomes a deadlocked conflict with the US. Hitler is painted sympathetically, as a victim, even, of the inevitable evil he’s merely an agent of, at one point beaten up by Jainlight, and ending up a sad old man in the States.

Tours of the Black Clock begins with murder (that of Jainlight, a murderer himself, a fratricide, and a not-entirely-sympathetic character), takes in New York and Germany and all kinds of surreal bad craziness, exploring Erickson’s black vision all the while; these aren’t our US and Germany. Ultimately, I suppose that this book is all about the nature of evil; an attempt at a semi-surreal fable. The tour of the black clock is a tour of the 20th century, an alternative apocalypse, which heals itself at the end of the book as the two timelines become the one we know.

Erickson’s gone into this kind of apocalyptic disaster before: Days Between Stations (1985), his first novel, evoked a post-disaster LA, with receded oceans and sandstorms in the streets, and featured multiple narrative strands. 1986’s Rubicon Beach, his equally stylish second novel, featured a futuristic sea-flooded LA, post-earthquake, again with multiple storylines. There are two Americas, and a witch. Is he still trying to write the same novel?

One good thing is that, baffling, bizarre and beguiling in its beautifully written prose, Tours of the Black Clock can’t be labelled as straightforward SF. Good. I hope there are more novels like this and lots of new writers reading Erickson. Seriously seriously weird, but also seriously seriously interesting. Weird and wonderful and, while I’m not sure he quite knows where he’s going, Erickson could become something like another Pynchon. •

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