In which I compare authors without really saying anything

Everyone (and I mean everyone) is writing about Haruki Murakami nowadays because of his new book. So I won't do that. I did just finish The Wind-up Bird Chronicle though and found it highly enjoyable.

I have been procrastinating on my book review assignment for FFH for the longest time now, on the subject of Steve Erickson's oeuvre (I'm surprised that a lot of those books are back in print; perhaps he's not as obscure as I thought he was). What I've read of Murakami (Wind-up Bird, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, some of his short fiction in the New Yorker) shares a fundamental dreaminess with Erickson's work. There are differences in pacing; while even Murakami's short fiction flows languidly, Erickson's is frenetic, jumping between viewpoints, time, and location in recounting his shared nightmares.

If you do a search on Amazon for "Steve Erickson," "Haruki Murakami" comes up as one of the related searches, so I guess I'm not the only person who finds them similar. Unless I'm the only person to have ever searched for "Steve Erickson" on Amazon and it's drawing from my search history to determine the related searches, which actually isn't too far-fetched.

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