Amnesiascope [signed] [first edition]

At once Erickson's funniest and most intensely confessional novel, Amnesiascope edges Los Angeles up against the next millennium and into a vortex of fire. Anarchic, relentlessly eroticized, and ravaged by cataclysm, it is an ecstatic landscape of floating time zones and time-capsule cemeteries, beachside bunkers and ghost airports, Persian domes and towering telescopes that refract memory - a landscape overrun by abducted strippers, nomadic artists, reluctant pornographers, subversive newspaper columnists, alienated movie critics, teenage hookers afraid of the rain, and legendary film-makers who may or may not exist. "I love the ashes," writes the narrator. "I love driving across one black ring after another all the way to the sea, through the charred palisades. In this particular epoch, when sex is the last subversive act, I'm a guerilla, spending my conscience in a white stream that douses no fires but its own."