In the waning summer days, a lake appears almost overnight in the middle of Los Angeles. Out of fear and love, a young single mother commits a desperate act: convinced that the lake means to take her small son from her, she determines to stop it and becomes the lake's Dominatrix-Oracle, "the Queen of the Zed Night." Acclaimed by many critics as Steve Erickson's greatest novel, Our Ecstatic Days takes place on the forbidden landscape of a defiant heart.
From Publishers Weekly
Erickson's dreamlike, postapocalyptic seventh novel, a follow-up to the well-received Sea Came in at Midnight , takes place in and around a lake that stands in what was once the middle of Los Angeles. Through a handful of fractured narratives, the author tells the story of a single mother, 21-year-old Kristin, and her three-year-old son, Kirk (short for Kierkegaard), who live in an abandoned hotel on the water. Kristin once belonged to a religious-suicide cult and has worked as a memory girl in Tokyo ("I used to be fucking fearless, you should know that about me"), but now she's paralyzed by the thought that Kirk will be swallowed up by the lake. Driven by her obsession, she dives into the lake herself, leaving Kirk to be stolen by owls. In competing alternate scenarios, a version of Kristin recovers her son, while another does not and instead becomes a dominatrix named Lulu. Meanwhile, a man named Wang appears, who seems to be a key figure in a resistance movement or crusade that is fighting a war in a North America whose borders have been rearranged. Erickson's treacherously shifting realities never quite cleave to an inner logic. More problematic, however, is the leaden handling of themes of birth, reproduction, motherhood and rebellion, which loom inert and inscrutable over the tale.
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From Booklist
Who but Erickson would take two characters, Louise and Kristin Blumenthal, from his last novel, The Sea Came in at Midnight (1999), make them a single character, then split them apart again? Erickson's stock in trade is duality, surrealism, and lyrical language, and so it is in this tale that loops back and forth through the twentieth century. Back from Tokyo, Kristin Blumenthal gives birth to a beautiful baby boy, Kirk (for Kierkegaard, whose twin sister, Bronte, is still undelivered) just as a lake starts rising from the center of L.A. to flood the city. But with the joy of the child comes the fear of losing him, the greatest loss known to humanity, and Kristin does lose her young son, only to discover another dual world years later. There are multiple connections through the years between major characters. Unusual textual format, broken chronology, and alternate realities are Erickson trademarks, but what gives this unusual humanity is the Hotel of the Thirteen Losses, showing, in its last room, the unendurable loss. Michele Leber
Copyright ยฉ American Library Association. All rights reserved