It's New Year's Eve 1999, and the members of a powerful cult are about to commit ritual suicide. Fleeing their ranks at the final moment, teenager Kristin lands in Tokyo, where she gains employment listening to clients' stories in a "memory hotel" designed to address the decay of Japanese collective memory after the Second World War. But Kristin herself has a startling odyssey: Among other things, it involves answering a personal ad only to wind up imprisoned, naked, in an empty house presided over by a man known as the Occupant, hard at work on a millennial calendar that has serious implications for the future. The Sea Came in at Midnight is a breathtaking fable of redemption and one of Erickson's most impressive visions to date.
"Erickson is a master, a dizzying rewriter of history, myth and apocalypse. In the author's universe, entire cities, entire cultures go insane all at once. From the ruins he creates a new tribe, a new kinship map, a strange new world for his characters to enter, reunited, close to whole."
Los Angeles Times Book Review
"One of the most important writers of his generation. Reading The Sea Came in at Midnight you feel your entire history speeding by as an amorphous blur. Erickson's work feels like right here, right now. Against it, most new fiction reads like it was written by stenographers."
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"If you read one philosophical-doomsday kinky-sex road-trip novel this year, make it this one."
