Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very happy to have as my guest, Steve Erickson, whose new novel, Zeroville,

has just been published by Europa Editions.

It's what's called a paperback original.

His other novels go back to his first, days between stations,

up to his last are ecstatic days.

But this novel, Zeroville, marks a real departure for Steve Erickson.

I had opened the book, and I'm used to a state of immediate,

metaphysical puzzlement in reading Steve Erickson. And this book, before I knew it,

I looked up, and I swear I'd read around 70, 80 pages. It moves really, really fast. How did you achieve that velocity?

Well, first of all, Michael, thanks for having me. I originally wrote a short story called Zeroville for an addition of McSweeney's.

I wrote the story and it was a few months after I had finished my last novel, Our Ecstatic Days,

and I was still kind of in that head, if you will.

And I realized several things about the story, the first of which was that there was at the core of it, what I thought was a pretty good idea, that I had never written fully about the movies before. They've worked their way into probably about half of my previous novels, but I had never written to the extent I wanted to.

But I also realized about the story that at the center of it was a, a character who I wasn't particularly satisfied with.

He was a film editor, but a much more ordinary and conventional character than the one who is in this novel.

And also that the style, which again was very much an output of the previous novel didn't seem suitable for this and that a novel

about the movies should move like the movies.

...