The course of a century is rewritten in this fabulously warped odyssey, named a best book of the year by the New York Times Tours of the Black Clock is a wild dream of the twentieth century as told by the ghost of Banning Jainlight. After a disturbing family secret is unearthed, Jainlight throws his father out of a window and burns down the Pennsylvania ranch where he grew up. He escapes to Vienna where he is commissioned to write pornography for a single customer identified as "Client X," which alters the trajectory of World War II. Eventually Jainlight is accompanied by an aged and senile Adolf Hitler back to America, where both men pursue the same lover. Tours of the Black Clock is a story in which history and the laws of space and time are unforgettably transformed.
"If fabulous new novels were Daylight Saving Time, Tours of the Black Clock would be the twenty-first of June. When the sun finally sets on this mind-ripping performance, the stars are afraid to come out."
Tom Robbins
"Brilliant, mesmerizing, a dazzling achievement that successfully challenges the conventions of fiction. You don't read Tours of the Black Clock so much as surrender to the dizzying stream that rushes past conventional boundaries, straight into the wounded lives of its characters."
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"A brutal, visionary novel that charges like a blind steed, Tours of the Black Clock takes on the Twentieth Century as its god and enemy. In Erickson's apocalyptic vision, the very scroll of history has set itself on fire."
