Dark Twins of a Distorted American Dream: Gary D. Rhodes’ OFFED and Steve Erickson’s SHADOWBAHN
Author: Gary D. Rhodes
Publisher: BearManor Media
Price: $14.95 (US)
Author: Steve Erickson
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Price: $16.00 (US)
“For the first time since his mad leap into his other life, he hears in his head the singing that is his voice but isn’t. Among the train’s passengers is talk of a shadow track that cuts through the heart of the century from one end to the other with impunity, as though no time exists of calibration or counting, only an era of the mind. Every shadow hides a shaft to the center of the Earth, from which blows the gust of cancellation.”
— Steve Erickson, Shadowbahn, 2017
“The journalists couldn’t draw the lines between the three murders and see the constellation they formed. All those ancient people looked up at the night sky and drew imaginary lines between stars, usually creating overly complicated pictures of mythical gods and heroes and crap. But the feet-on-the-desk media were clearly asleep at the wheel when it came to my work, or else they didn’t have a lick of sense.”
— Gary D. Rhodes, Offed, 2020
The past four years have produced at least two essential “Trump-era” novels, narratives that encapsulate (in a fictional framework) the dark and bloody zeitgeist of our current political climate. Watching the recent images of extreme rightwing “Proud Boys” marching through the streets of Portland, Oregon immediately brought to mind the psychotic narrator of Gary D. Rhodes’ 2020 debut novel Offed, which chronicles the rise and fall (and rise?) of a nascent serial killer named Birch Barr who — at random — murders a famous leftwing activist in Oklahoma. As a result, this apolitical sociopath rises through the ranks of rightwing celebrities and is soon anointed as a modern day revolutionary hero on par with Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Patrick Henry, etc.
The man most responsible for proclaiming Barr a saint is Robert Lynch, a Rush-Limbaugh-like rightwing talk show host who sees in Barr’s murderous exploits all the makings of an epic ratings grab. Barr, who soon emerges into public life under the respectable moniker “The Artist,” receives so much positive reinforcement for his celebrity murder that he begins targeting leftwing politicians on purpose, despite the fact that he possesses little more than a Chauncey-Gardiner-level knowledge of the modern American political scene. All “The Artist” knows is that the politics of hate allow his naturally vicious tendencies to blossom in a socially acceptable context.
Readers who find dramatic irony a difficult concept to grasp might want to stay away from this novel. For the rest of you, however, those who wish to take a behind-the-scenes peek into (and, therefore, better understand) the mindboggling banality of 100% pure, All-American lunacy, get yourself a copy of Offed. A darkly absurd tale of a sociopathic serial killer being elevated to the status of a twenty-first century folk hero couldn’t be more relevant during these hyper-strange times in which we all find ourselves. If Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho), Rex Miller (Slob), and Jerzy Kosinski (Being There) had all hooked up for a delightfully perverse menage a trois, Offed might very well have been the unholy result.
The second novel that best reflects our current political zeitgeist is Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn, a mad leap into a uniquely North American strain of fabulism that explores the binary opposites of U.S. politics in the form of a quasi-surreal alternate universe in which Elvis Presley died at birth and was survived by his (real life) twin, Jesse. This novel is a twisted love letter to shadows, doppelgangers, and what remains of a bifurcated American Dream. Dr. Carl Jung would have been fascinated by it, as Jung’s “shadow theory” seems to permeate every page. As with Erickson’s previous tour-de-force masterworks such as Rubicon Beach, Tours of the Black Clock, and Arc d’X (among many others), the reader can only sit back in stunned silence and absorb what Jonathan Lethem describes as Erickson’s “lucid-dreaming prose” while, within the mind’s eye, the decaying corpse of America is sliced open and autopsied by Erickson’s incendiary imagination. Rather than dissecting and torching and cremating the idea of the American Dream, Erickson’s novels often feel more like loving attempts to resurrect the promise of freedom that has been inherent in this nation from its very beginnings.
Erickon’s ongoing obsession with binary opposites manifests in Shadowbahn in a unique way: One ordinary afternoon the Twin Towers reemerge from the past and materialize in the middle of the South Dakota Badlands, broadcasting the music of America’s past like giant antennas that can somehow tap into the airwaves of a better (and more authentic?) American reality. On the top floor of the South Tower lies the sleeping form of Jesse Presley, Elvis’ twin who died at birth back in January of 1935. Is this the same Jesse who would have lived if not edged out of existence by America’s most famous singer, or merely one of many possible Jesse’s who could have existed in a variety of alternate realities? Are these the real Twin Towers, somehow plucked out of time and space milliseconds before they fell, or are they the idealized hopes and dreams of America’s potential future resurrected and relocated by the collective unconscious of a divided nation? As always in his novels, thankfully, Erickson offers no clear answers.
Jesse’s journey from ignorance to illumination begins with a suicidal leap off the roof of the South Tower, a desperate plunge that parallels a far more infamous descent taken by a little girl named Alice over two hundred years before (in a country from which the jabberwocky we know as America initially emerged). Instead of ending up in Wonderland, Jesse finds himself lost in a parallel universe in which Elvis never existed, John Lennon was never assassinated by Mark David Chapman, The Beatles languished in obscurity, and a wheelchair-bound JFK was shot to death by Valerie Solanas at Andy Warhol’s Factory in New York on June 3rd, 1968. This allegorical exploration of parallel Americas reminds me of Jack Womack’s “Dryco” series of dystopian novels (e.g., Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Ambient, Elvissey, etc.) that concluded with Womack’s 2000 novel Going, Going, Gone in which alternate Americas eventually converge into a single nation — one that is, hopefully, less violent and authoritarian than the nightmare iterations that preceded it. Erickson’s Shadowbahn, like Womack’s own novels, attempts to bridge the seemingly unbridgeable gap that exists between wounded twin-Americas and somehow merge them into a healed (or healing) whole.
If Gary Rhodes’ horrific satire Offed shows us what happens when sociopathy and self-gratification and celebrity worship is pushed to extremes, then Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn shows us what happens when divisiveness is pushed to equally psychotic extremes. In his 1972 book Take Today, Marshall McLuhan contended that any technology, when pushed to its (un)natural extreme, will flip into its opposite function. If America can be viewed as a piece of technology, nothing more than a machine (as the industrialists of the late nineteenth century no doubt believed), then it must be considered a flawed device forged by flawed idealists; perhaps, then, we shouldn’t be surprised when the gears of that flawed device begin to break down and shudder and wobble and fall. When the Dream becomes defective, when it runs down due to neglect and ignorance, the shadow naturally emerges to take its place: the nightmare-twin that rejects the music of the Towers and embraces the dissonance of seething hatred instead. Shadowbahn is Erickson’s phantasmagoric attempt to reclaim the music of America’s initial promise. Rhodes, on the other hand, wishes to rub our faces in the most extreme, violent and distorted form of our own shadow selves.
I highly recommend reading Rhodes’ Offed and Erickson’s Shadowbahn in a row: dark twins about the parallel possibilities offered by the strange and unbelievable realities of modern day America.
