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 Los Angeles 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.
On the ninety-third floor, Jesse Presley—the stillborn twin of the most famous singer who ever lived—suddenly awakes, driven mad over the hours and days to come 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 that no one has seen.
Haunting, audacious, and undaunted, Shadowbahn is a winding and reckless ride through intersections of danger, destiny, and the conjoined halves of a ruptured nation.
Steve Erickson is
the author of both fiction and nonfiction works, including two books on
American politics and popular culture that have been published in ten
languages. His work has appeared in such publications as Esquire, Rolling
Stone, and the New York Times magazine.
He is currently the film critic for Los Angeles magazine and the editor of the literary journal Black Clock,
which is published by the California Institute of the Arts, where he teaches.
He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters
award in literature.View all by Steve Erickson
