“I believe,” says the attorney general, with the faintest trace of a smile that the sheriff would love to stick a gun in, “the whole wide world has come to the conclusion that you’re the perfect person for this job.” There’s this laugh out loud moment where the Attorney General forces a soon to be retired sheriff to enter the Towers. Not just the appearance of the towers, but the reluctance of officials to take jurisdiction and responsibility. The first third of the novel is terrific.
Initially, Erickson makes this point with burning hot prose and some wicked humour. America is no longer the country, the dream, its people thought it was – assuming it ever stood for anything, assuming there was ever a consensus. Each ingredient, as disparate and strange as they are, all hit the same basic message. And in an alternative history, JFK never gets the Presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention, losing it to Adlai Stevenson. On the 93rd floor of the newly minted Twin Towers, Jesse Presley – the still-born brother of Elvis – wakes up on a board table. Music begins to vanish from radios, from CDs from people’s memories. The Twin Towers reappear in South Dakota twenty years after they were destroyed. Erickson employs a multitude of metaphors to describe this.
The death of America – or at least the ideals and dreams that famously underpin the country. That said, he has no difficulty describing a broken America.Īnd that’s basically what this book about. Not even Erickson, for all the weirdness that occurs in Shadowbahn, could imagine a Trump Presidency. It’s already been described as the first post-Trump novel, which is a tad ironic given the President – not named – in Erickson’s near future (the book is set in 2021) is female and it’s under this female President (look, we know it’s Hillary) that America fractures into a “disunion”. So what to make of Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn.
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