Shadowbahn
When the Twin Towers suddenly reappear in the Badlands of South Dakota twenty years after their
fall, nobody can explain their return. To the hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands
drawn to the "American Stonehenge" — including Parker and Zema, siblings on their way from
L.A. to visit their mother in Michigan — the Towers seem to sing, even as everybody hears a
different song. A rumor overtakes the throng that someone can be seen in the high windows of the
southern structure where, on the ninety-third floor, Jesse Presley — the stillborn twin of
the most famous singer who ever lived — suddenly awakes. Over the hours and days to come,
Jesse is driven mad by a voice in his head that sounds like his but isn't, and by the memory of a
country where he survived in his brother's place. Meanwhile, Parker and Zema cross a possessed
landscape by a mysterious detour no one knows, charted on a map no one has seen.
"A battle hymn... the novel of now." Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune
"Gorgeous, compassionate, weird, unpredictable, alarmingly prescient.... an answer to and
sanctuary from the American Century to come." Fiona Maazel, New York Times Book
Review
"A beautiful, moving, strange examination of apocalypse and rebirth." Neil Gaiman
"Jaw-dropping. A tour-de-forcer's tour-de-force." Jonathan Lethem, Granta
"Grabs hold of its narrative idea early and never lets go. A Southern California Ballard or
Beckett, Erickson was post-millennial before the millennium ever got here." Scott Bradfield,
Los Angeles Times
"Alive with laughter and surprising in the ways it stirs the heart." John Domini,
Washington Post
"Mindbending... daringly written... a gem." Publisher's Weekly
"Audacious. Takes on American myth and history, pushing our imaginative borders along ever
shadowy faultlines." BBC
"Thoroughly excellent. Philip K. Dick on smoother acid with an updated
soundtrack." Kirkus (starred review)
"Epoch-defining. An American Heart of Darkness almost by accident." The
Rumpus
"The first key novel of the Trump Era. A bulwark against the belief that the only response to
incomprehensibility is inaction." David Leo Rice, The Believer
"A great, great, great, great novel. I could say more — about its big-world heartedness
and old-world shadowness, about twins and towers, brothers and sisters — and it would add up
to the same thing: great. Sung, of course." Mark Z. Danielewski
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