3 Comments
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Christina Ehrhardt:
Bin beeindruckt, lieber Micha!
Was für eine junge Stimme, fast wie damals💥
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Michael Engelbrecht:
Ich staune. Wir mailen.
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Peter Jasper:
Michael, a gift for Jon Hassell that suita the magic of City, Works of Fiction. Steve Erockson‘s Amnesiascope, a hell of a ride. Things do happen in Amnesiascope, conveyed through the narrator’s hilarious, pathetic, decadent but conscience-ridden monologue, but this is a novel which is less about plot and much more about voice and place. Erickson’s romantic-cynic narrator explores what’s left of a millennial post-earthquake L.A. where strange, warped things exist without ever being quite fully explained, and the rest of the world goes on unchanged.
Stories involving a noir, Apocalyptic L.A. can sometimes be boring and cliched, but L.A.’s noir side works with bittersweet absurdity here. That’s because it’s written from within the heart of L.A., fully cognizant of the city’s flaws, but with a crazy grief and a crazy love that goes deeper than the surface perceptions of this city often portrayed by the media.
Amnesiascope (and L.A. and the narrator) is demented, cynical, and heartbreaking, but also a place where individuality flourishes; it is hallucinatory and real; erotic and kinky, but with a deep and struggling romanticism buried beneath the wreckage of the narrator’s life and his ruined city.
Because ultimately, this novel is a heroic call to keep living life on your own terms, to say the things that need to be said, to reinvent yourself every time a part of you is killed off, and most romantic of all, to keep trying to be free in a society that wants to box you up and define you by its own boring cliches.