Editor's Cut
Ahh, the lure of the madman — the harrowed, sinewy figure with glowing eyes who approaches out of the shadows, burning to communicate his incommunicable truth. Think of Jack Nicholson in "The Shining" with his wild stare and lurking ax: "Heeeeeere's Johnny!" When such a person nears, do you step back? Do you linger, frozen in terror, compelled by his mesmeric gaze? Or do you, like Vikar, the "cinéautistic" protagonist of Steve Erickson's latest novel, "Zeroville," regard him quizzically, without fear, thinking only, "I don't understand comedies"?
Erickson, the film critic for Los Angeles magazine, writes surreal, highly visual novels that he splices together as if they were art films. Two of his earlier books, "The Sea Came In at Midnight" and "Our Ecstatic Days," feature the same symbolic heroine, Kristin, a young woman who bears a child named Kierkegaard (Kirk for short) to an "apocalyptologist" in Los Angeles, only to have the child disappear as the city is inundated by magical portents — a lake fills the valley, owls swirl overhead and invisible "melody snakes" infest the skies.
Yes, Erickson likes to mess with his readers' heads. But that's nothing compared with what he's done to the head of Ike Jerome (known as Vikar to his friends because of his divinity-school background and mystic mien), the troubled, visionary hero of the fascinating piece of phantasmagoric Hollywood homage that is "Zeroville." Vikar's shaved head is covered with a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor, "the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies," their lips nearly touching in a close-up from "A Place in the Sun." Strangers who meet Vikar recoil from the skin cartoon that stains his cranium, but unless you offend the flesh and blood (or celluloid) people Vikar loves, you're safe. In the words of the Clash, one of the punk bands he listens to, "Everybody say, 'He sure look funny.' / Ah but that's Montgomery Clift, honey!"
Terse, fanciful, dreamlike and sometimes nightmarish, this remarkable novel will test you and tease you and leave you desperate to line up at Film Forum (or hunt down Erickson's top 150 on DVD) so you can submit yourself to the celluloid bonds that hold Vikar and his creator such willing captives.
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