We'd love to be able to link you to Scott Martelle's interesting Los Angeles Times profile of Steve Erickson, but as it remains blocked off behind the usual impenetrable wall, we direct you instead to this Journal Gazette review of Our Ecstatic Days.
But for all its convolutions and stylistic excesses – and for all the demands it makes on the reader’s patience – it is the work of a serious writer with a singular, deeply personal vision. By the end, this messy, ambitious novel pulls itself together, illuminating a society in which chaos almost – but never quite – wins, in which primal human connections, particularly the connection between parents and children, keep us going in the face of catastrophic loss. “Our Ecstatic Days” is a baroque, visionary novel rooted in fundamental truths, and is well worth the considerable effort it requires.
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