The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Sea Came in at Night by Steve Erickson
Trey Strecker

Steve Erickson. The Sea Came in at Midnight. Avon, 1999. 259 pp. $23.00.

Steve Erickson’s latest millennial tale navigates a psychic landscape of spiritual exhaustion and existential confusion that will be familiar to readers of his earlier work. Kristin, the novel’s young protagonist, narrowly escapes a cult suicide as 1,999 women and children walk off a California cliff at the stroke of the new millennium. As the novel opens, Kristin remembers how she came to the edge of the cliff before fleeing to Tokyo and becoming a “memory girl” at the Hotel Ryu, where she shares her story with a customer who has died. Desperate and homeless, Kristin had answered the strange personal ad of a man known as the Occupant, who had needed someone to console him after his true love—not coincidentially, the dead Japanese man’s estranged daughter—mysteriously disappeared. An apocalypologist, the Occupant keeps a calendar mapping “the routes and capitals of chaos” and searching for a scheme to order the inexpicable horrors of modern life. This obsession grows out of his effort to understand a personal apocalyptic event from his childhood—a shooting involving his parents during the May 1968 student revolts in Paris.
For Erickson’s characters, apocalypse is intensely personal. These traumatic events must be remembered as a part of the “ever-fluid, ever-transforming map” of identity. As the characters struggle to find meaning in their lives, readers trace the looping plotlines that link the characters and their stories in this tangled web of time, where the present exists in an uneasy balance between our dreams of the future and our memories of the past. The cyclical nature of these “apocalytic tide[s]” signals the beginning of new millennia and allows Erickson to leave open the possibility of redemption, either real or imagined. [Trey Strecker]