The Sea Came in at Midnight [Hardcover]

Steve Erickson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1999

Steve Erickson is a visionary novelist whose time has come. Considered by many the secret heir to Pynchon and DeLillo, he has steadily acquired a passionate following of readers over the course of five previous novels. Now, with "The Sea Came at Midnight," Erickson delivers a masterwork of intense feeling, scope and power--an intimate epic of late twentieth-century civilization in free fall, an unforgettable young woman's revelation amid the ruins.

In the final seconds of the old millennium, 1,999 women and children march off the edge of a cliff in Northern California, urged on by a cult of silent men in white robes. Kristin was meant to be the two-thousandth to fall. But when at the last moment she flees, she exchanges one dark destiny for a future that will unravel the present.

Answering a cryptic personals ad for a woman "at the end of her rope," Kristin finds temporary haven in the Hollywood Hills with an older, unnamed man as obsessed as he is spiritually ravaged. In a locked room at the bottom of his house, he labors over his life's work: a massive blue calendar the size of a tsunami that measures modern time by the events of chaos and pinpoints the true beginning of the new millenium as not midnight December 31, 1999, but the early hours of one May morning in 1968. This calendar is shot through with the threads of other lives-those searching for a small measure of redemption and an answer to the question, "What's missing from the world?"

From a ritual sacrifice in the name of salvation to a ritual sacrifice in the name of pleasure, from an ancient haunted Celtic tower in Brittany to the revolving memory hotels of Tokyo, from a cinematic hoax in Manhattan that costs fivewomen their lives to a mysterious bloodstained set of coordinates tacked to the wall of an abandoned San Francisco penthouse, "The Sea Came at Midnight" is a breathtaking literary dance of fate and coincidence. And, unknown even to her, at the center of that dance is the seventeen-year-old.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

God invented millennia for writers like Steve Erickson. Erickson's previous books have buried L.A.'s freeways in sand, set bonfires in Paris streets, and hitched along for the 1996 presidential campaign. In terms of madness, doom, and sheer human folly, what could possibly be left? Plenty, as it turns out. As The Sea Came in at Midnight opens, 17-year-old Kristin works in a Japanese "memory hotel," where despite her so-so looks she's in high demand. As an American, "Kristin represents the Western annihilation of ancient Japanese memory and therefore its master and possessor, a red bomb in one hand, a red bottle of soda pop in the other." After one of her best clients expires in the booth, she finally tells him her own story--which turns out to be quite a tale, involving escape from a millennial suicide cult and nude solitary confinement at the behest of a man known only as the Occupant. Add in the novel's other threads, which span 40 years and include a dream cartographer, a chaos-based calendar, time capsules, and both real and faked snuff films, and you have a heady mixture indeed. Fans of Erickson's unsettling, dreamlike style are legion, and they won't be disappointed in his latest take on the End Time, Blade Runner-style. But in a way, the millennium is beside the point; with a plot like this one, a mere flipping of digits seems so much apocalyptic icing on the cake. Combing a lyrical surrealism with a jittery, jump-cut technique, Erickson writes like the 21st-century heir of Pynchon and DeLillo. --Chloe Byrne

From Publishers Weekly

Strip clubs, sexual slavery, Paris dreams, New York horror and California misery catastrophically define and entrap the troubled margin-dwellers inhabiting this penetrating dream vision of the post-nuclear world. At the center is Kristin, who escapes her fate as the last of 2000 women and children sacrificed in a millennialist cult ritual only to become the sex slave of a self-proclaimed "apocalyptologist" she knows only as the Occupant. The Occupant is obsessed with mapping out the world's increasingly bizarre eruptions of violenceAmany of which have shaped and twisted his own lifeAon an unconventional calendar that soon has Kristin at its epicenter. Another agitated, tormented character is Louise Blumenthal, aka Lulu Blu, the screenwriter of the world's first snuff film, a hoax that subsequently spawned actual murders. Louise seeks to absolve herself of her crimes by trying to save future snuff actresses and ritualistically vandalizing satellite dishes in L.A. Erickson (Days Between Stations; Amnesiascope) sends his agile prose careening ever deeper into these intertwined lives, their disturbing memories and often tragic choices following a kind of grim logic. This provocative novel is often funny but always serious and lush with insights that make its often outlandish elements eerily familiar. The razor-sharp narrative balances a nonchalant chaos with an unrelenting stream of violence and tenderness; even the most monstrous psyche in Erickson's ensemble of stoic na?fs, murderous sadists and the sexually plundered is brilliantly rendered as not only sympathetic, but honest, vigorous and enduring.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 259 pages
• Publisher: Bard; 1st edition (April 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380977664
• ISBN-13: 978-0380977666
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #898,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Steve Erickson is the author of nine novels, including 2012's THESE DREAMS OF YOU, and two nonfiction works. His books have appeared on best-of-the-year lists in Newsweek, the Washington Post BookWorld, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice and the New York Times Book Review. He's the editor of the literary journal Black Clock, published by the California Institute of the Arts where he teaches; he also writes about film for Los Angeles magazine and the current presidential campaign for American Prospect. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' award in literature.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Luminous. Does the work that tragedy should..., October 6, 2000

By 

Adam Greenfield "Clean living under difficult... (Helsinki, Finland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sea Came in at Midnight (Paperback)

In 1991 I read Erickson's *Tours of the Black Clock*, and came away touched to the core by his reckoning with evil, loss, and the secret history of the Twentieth Century; I felt in finishing the book as if I had been given an incredible gift. He was definitely going to be one to watch.

Well, I devoured *Amnesiascope* and *Arc D'X* and *Rubicon Beach*, but despite the appearance of the same tropes (like J.G. Ballard, Erickson obsessively redeploys the same imagery, in his case fractured time, deserted Chinatowns, flooded cities) they didn't bring me off quite the way *Tours* did.

Now *Sea* does, again. It's a haunting and beautiful meditation on time, loss, evil, and redemption - call it a scruffier alternate take on DeLillo's *Underworld*, for post-boomers. It's uneven in spots, but it did the work that all great writing is supposed to do: it triggered the simultaneous grief, acceptance, and joy in that acceptance that means you've arrived, at long last, at your own life. You should buy this book.

Oh, and: thanks, Steve.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating but Flawed, May 14, 2000

By 

Chris Parker - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Sea Came in at Midnight (Paperback)

Steve Erickson is one of the most challenging and visionary of all contemporary American writers and the fact that many of his books are going out of print is certainly cause for alarm. While some critics have compared Erickson to Pynchon and DeLillo, and there may be some similarities, "The Sea Came in at Midnight" shows Erickson moving past such comparisons and developing a style and technique that is very much his own. "The Sea Came in at Midnight" is certainly his finest novel to date but it is, unfortunately, plagued by some of the same inconsistencies of his previous work.

The thematic and stylistic elements of which this novel is composed are the stuff of undeniable brilliance. The innovative structure of the novel is also an asset through most of the novel but by the time we near the end it has become one of the most problematic elements. In this novel Erickson tells several stories at once, weaving each into the others with intricacy and skill. Among the many plots that emerge are a teenage girl's attempt to dream, a madman's attempt to document the world's slide into apocalypse and another teenage girl's brush with death on film. Each plot thread makes for engrossing reading and as I read I was constantly surprised by how Erickson managed to tie one plot thread to the others.

The problem is that by the time the end of the novel approaches, which is far too fast, none of the plot lines actually terminate, they just trail out into space. It is possible that Erickson tried to do too much in too small a space - just over 250 pages. This novel might have been better if it had been a hundred or so pages longer and Erickson had been able to bring everything together and create some sort of closure. As it is thing never come full circle, and while perhaps it was not Erickson's intention to close the circle for a while he makes it look like he is definitely trying.

Even so "The Sea Came in at Midnight" is a fantastic and absorbing novel, one which is well worth reading more than once. I am eagerly anticipating Erickson's next work and I can only hope that his genius will not continue to go unnoticed.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What is The Sea?, February 12, 2001

By 

Michael Clark (Denver, CO USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Sea Came in at Midnight (Paperback)

The three nights I spent reading Erickson's "The Sea Came at Midnight" were both riveting and disturbing. Rarely do I dream, but Erickson's fantasy gave my nights urgent and almost panicked visions. In retrospect I fancy my mind unable to process the wild implications and subconscious import driven to point by only the experiences of his few characters. "The Sea Came at Midnight" is not only beautifully written and well-composed, but it is also ominous... Like all significant works of writing it leaves you hungrier than sated, straining to bring into focus the looming world you know lays waiting behind the words -- A world that is more your own than Erickson's, because he has only given you a fleeting, piercing glimpse at all you refuse to perceive about humanity.