RaveThe RumpusThis is an extremely timely novel, as much by unfortunate accident as by design. If Hilary Clinton had won in November Shadowbahn still would be a profound precautionary tale, but Donald Trump’s election lends it a portentousness Erickson himself couldn’t entirely have seen coming ... Erickson is a master of refraction. His narrative fractals fit together exactly at the point you think they’re about to fall apart. But the parallel world we enter when reading Shadowbahn is a serious confabulation. We witness mass cultural amnesia as characters float through an America pervaded by uncertainty, fractured by a sweeping Disunion movement. This book is not a political novel because it deals in hinterlands. It isn’t topical or tabloid. It’s a book not so much about American history as about American memory ... This unconditional approach to art over business makes Erickson’s work an antidote, arriving at a pivotal moment. Shadowbahn will be an epoch-defining book in Trump’s America. It’s an American Heart of Darkness almost by accident.
