Some guy wakes up nine years later and he's a completely different person? I can't.

Steve Erickson, I am so angry with you.
This novel has completely turned my views around on what good writing is supposed to be. I want to go back and remove stars from some other titles just to show how strong this 5 star title is. How inconsiderate! How dare you drench this novel in such rich language, coupled with magical imagery, unforgettable characters, and a tale of heart wrenching unrequited love.
I will be recommending this to all my friends with a WARNING: Nothing you read will ever amount to this tale ever again. You will yearn for more, you will want to write nasty letters to the author advising him that he has raised the bar far too high.
Don't come into this expecting not to work... there is a beautiful story here underneath vivid magical imagery. All the feels.... overwhelmed. ( )

Six-word review: Reflecting the light, windows become mirrors.

Extended review:

When I face writing a review of a book that mystified me, it's less like a challenge and more like a dare. How much of an idiot am I going to look like this time? 40 percent? 80 percent? I guess I'll have to take the chance, consoling myself with the facts that so far my admissions of bewilderment haven't been fatal and that I haven't even always been the only one.

But first I'm going to revisit what happens when you take a paper Möbius strip and cut it right down the center line. Do you get one long Möbius strip? Two strips linked together like a chain? No, you get a double-length strip with two twists in it.

How is that relevant? It isn't.

Recalling Days Between Stations just a few days after finishing it is like recalling a dream, or a hallucination, or a dream of a hallucination. In my notes I called it enigmatic and mesmerizing. It's not that the sentences aren't perfectly clear, well formed, linear, and grammatical or the descriptions aren't vivid and fine. But the images seem to relate to one another like successive frescoes painted on a plaster wall, the shadows of one showing through another so that you aren't sure which is the subject and which is the ghost.

Parts of it, indeed, seem to take place in the halting, haunting imagery of a silent movie of the 1920s. I see the characters, one in particular, rendered in sepia, with shadowed eyes and a desperate, hopeless beauty, ripe for a rescue that never comes.

There's a story, all right--at its barest, a love triangle. But the story seems no more essential to the novel--essential in its literal sense, being of the basic nature or essence of it--than the subject matter is essential to an abstract painting configured to display color, texture, dynamic range, and emotional expression.

Since finishing this novel, I've read a 200-page explication of the Heart Sutra by Red Pine. Unenlightened though I am, I'm better able to tell you what happens there in the heart of Zen than I can give you with assurance an account of the narrative of Days Between Stations. It's not just the sand, the water, the ice, the twins, the identities, the transmogrifying, the flickering silent films, the lost bicycle racers, or the lost children.

It's memory and perception. It's sensory experience and mental constructs. It's being. It's time.

Here's something that happened to me while I was reading the novel:

When I paused one night on about page 176, I forgot to move my bookmark and left it at the arbitrary future spot where I'd parked it while reading. So the next night I picked up at page 208. I didn't realize that I'd skipped 32 pages because I was no more disoriented than usual, no more puzzled over continuity and logic. Finally after about 18 pages I turned back to look for something--and realized that there was a whole chunk I hadn't read at all. So I returned to the beginning of the section I'd skipped and read forward from there. When, presently, I came back through the 18 pages I'd read ahead of sequence, including the passage about the lost bicyclists, there was of course literal déjà vu, so fitting for this of all books.

I would like to call this a fantasy, but the term has become so degraded through the popularity of genre fiction featuring wizards and dragons that it seems discourteously inept to apply it here. Comparisons are wanting, but there is a similarity of feeling to the novels of Haruki Murakami. I was also persistently reminded of Camus's The Fall, maybe especially because of the laugh. And the circling back to view the same moment from different vantage points, as if through different windows in different structures and different moving vehicles. Something like eternity, as explained by Joseph Campbell, being not foreverness but a timeless present.

I never encountered an explanation of the title, but by the end I hazarded a weak theory, having to do with Michel's journey by train from Paris: an idea of years and lives taking place between days, and the suspicion that all the stations he passes through are Wyndeaux. ( )

Steve Erickson is like the Pink Floyd of modern novelists, and Days Between Stations is his Dark Side of the Moon.

Erickson's debut from 1985 is one of the most gnostic of more contemporary novels I've encountered. I tried for about a month to explain it all in a real review, draft after crumpled draft, and finally cut my losses with the opening one-liner above. I've never been able to adequately encapsulate any of the four novels of Steve Erickson's I've read — the three others so far being Tours of the Black Clock, The Sea Came in at Midnight, and Our Ecstatic Days — but maybe that's a good thing, testament to the preternatural imagination and mysticism of Erickson's that permeates the spare pages of his mesmerizing novel's universe where "the clocks have all stopped" and mysterious rooms are self-lit without any known sources of electricity or natural light: these "stations" of the novel's title that serve only a select few hyper-attuned inhabitants of Paris and Los Angeles living simultaneously in the present and past; characters who may or may not be incarnations of characters who've lived before, people who "live in the window," as Erickson more eloquently describes it, and who have rediscovered a certain enigmatic and believed-to-be-unfinished film from the silent movie era, Adolphe Sarre's La Mort de Marat, possessing such unimaginable power that its very reel may serve as a metaphysical conduit — a station itself — between the ephemeral and eternal. A person in possession of such a movie just might become immortal themselves! Or maybe dead.

Check out the website for Days Between Stations, the "art rock" band, inspired by Steve Erickson's novel. ( )

An incredible book. Dreamlike and strange. ( )