(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

This is one of two books I've recently read that I didn't care for enough to finish, but weren't exactly terrible so didn't want to include them in my snarky "Too Awful to Finish" series of essays. And indeed, the premise behind Steve Erickson's Zeroville is a compelling one, which made me want to pick it up in the first place -- it's the story of a magically strange seminary student in the 1960s who gets exposed to movies late in life, immediately falls in love with them, quits the seminary and moves to LA (after first getting a giant tattoo from a classic film tattooed across the top of his head), realizes that all the so-called "mavericks of the new school" are mouth-breathing morons with no sense of film history, and ends up in Forrest-Gump style accidentally stumbling into a high-paying career as a script-fixer and film editor for all of them. Ah, but then I started actually reading the book, and realized that Erickson is one of them high-falutin' academic writers, and I confess that I have a low tolerance for so-called academic writers and their delicate award-winning novels. Oh, you know what I mean: "Look at me! Look at all the big words I know! Everything's so droll and terrible! Look at all the metaphors I know! We're all miserable! Hooray! Okay, wait, now I'm going to insert a mini-essay about some obscure movie from the 1930s most of my readers have never heard of! It's meta! It's meta meta! Look at me! I have a Master's degree! Give me a National Book Critics Circle award now, please!" Bleh. Like I said, not necessarily bad, just certainly not my cup of tea; buyer beware.

Out of 10: 5.0 ( )

Erickson is, among other things, a film critic, and for a significant part of its length this book might as well be called "Random Musings on Cinema in General and a Whole Bunch of Movies I Particularly Like, by Steve Erickson." Said musings are transplanted into the fictional head of Vikar Jerome, a film fanatic who flees a repressively religious childhood for the mythical land of Hollywood. There he wanders among the famous and wannabe-famous, mouthing naively "profound" pronouncements like a proto-punk Forrest Gump, and stumbling more or less by accident into a career as a film editor.

Vikar's internal monologue is a constant spew of references to films, actors, and filmmakers - some explicitly named, some not. This may be Quentin Tarantino's dream novel - or would be if Vikar's taste ran to trashier movies (he's more into tasteful classics). But if - like me - you've never been a fan of Tarantino types, you probably won't have the patience to track down all the cultural references you don't immediately get.

This is not to say I didn't enjoy the book. Even recognizing less than half the movies and celebrities Erickson not-quite-name-checks, I did enjoy his take on film theory. The barrage of film references thins out later in the book, as Vikar's life becomes more eventful (involving, among other things, a major Gump moment at Cannes and a bizarre take on the biblical Abraham and Isaac story). And both Vikar's internal musings (he's prissily paranoid about "illicit narcotics") and the utterances of the absurd hipsters around him are often hilarious. If you appreciated the black humor of, say, the "princess" sequence in Erickson's _Amnesiascope_, or the scene in his _The_Sea_Came_In_At_Midnight_ when one character tries to convince another to let him out of a locked room, _Zeroville_ is a must-read. ( )

Zeroville by Steve Erickson is a cult novel. You can tell it's a cult novel because it's full of very hip cultural references and it's hero is a disaffected wanderer with tendencies towards violence. I like cult novels and I liked Zeroville.

Vikar Jerome, the novels hero, sort of strays into Hollywood without much of a past and without much of a plan for the future. What he does have is a head full of cinematic knowledge; so much so that it is actually visable. He has a tattoo of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in a scene from A Place in the Sun on the side of his head. Vikar reminded me very much of Hazel Motes from Wise Blood, probably because I just read it, and of Ignatius J. Riley from A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. I think if you crossed the two of them and threw the product into The Day of the Locust you'd be pretty close to understanding Zeroville.

I fear that, so far, this probably sounds like I didn't like the book, but I'm just not sure quite what to make of it yet. One of the characters talks about seeing a movie six times and saying "God, I hate this movie," every time, then seeing it a seventh time and saying "God, I love this movie." I think that may be a common experience with readers of Zeroville.

After Vikar wanders into Hollywood, he sort of wanders into a series of jobs in the movies culminating with a chance to direct his own film. Along the way he meets various people and befriends them through no real effort on his own part. All he really wants to do is watch movies, and watch movies he does. Erickson spends a lot of time summarizing the movies Vikar sees; sometimes he names them and sometimes we have to guess what the movie is. He does the same things with the people Vikar meets, naming a few celebrities and letting us figure out who the rest of them are. Far from becoming annoying, this is actually fun. In fact, I plan to thumb through the book and add most Vikar's movie lists to my Netflix queue.

Throughout the novel Vikar is haunted by a recurring dream and by the idea that all movies contain a secret movie that wants to be released. How readers react to the way this idea plays out will probaby determine whether or not they end up liking the book enough to seek out Mr. Erickson's other work. I'm not really sure what I think of it, but I'll be thinking about it for a while; I'll also be looking into other books by Steve Erickson.

I'm giving Zeroville by Steve Erickson five out of five stars. ( )

I liked it, but it was a probably a bit over my head. I would recommend it, and I loved all of the references, but yeah, I'm not quite sure what happened. ( )

I read this book in one sitting. If you love any of the following things--old movies, Hollywood, the 1960s, Montgomery Clift, naive main characters, freaking weird main characters, books that are profound because they are difficult to understand, books that seem to make sense after mulling them over for a month, books that stick with you long after you read them--read Zeroville by Steve Erickson. I am not familiar with his other work, but if this book is any indication, he is one of the most criminally ignored writers in America. ( )