Tours of the Black Clock

Cutting a terrifying path from a Pennsylvania farm to the Europe of the 1930s, Banning Jainlight becomes the private pornographer of the world's most evil man. In a Vienna window he glimpses a lost erotic dream and travels to the Twentieth Century's darkest corner, to confront a clock with no face where memory is the gravity of time and all the numbers fall like rain.

"Magnificent, haunting, a rare and original novel."
New York Times

"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."
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."
Boston Globe

"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

"Erickson's finest novel. Its closing chapters are among the most powerful and haunting in recent American fiction."
Interview

"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

"A novel that declares a major writer in our midst. Pynchon, Nabokov, DeLillo — Steve Erickson has approached their heights."
Wall Street Journal