Our ecstatic days

Erickson continues the themes of millennial obsessions that preoccupied him in The Sea Came in at Midnight (1999), this time in a lush, profoundly disorienting story saturated in metaphors of birth and apocalyptic decadence. As it opens, Kristin, who appeared in Sea, is a former rough chick made tender by motherhood. She lives in a hotel with her young son Kirk (short for Kierkegaard), on the edge of a lake (called Lake Zero, as in, you know, Ground Zero) that suddenly appeared and overtook much of downtown Los Angeles at the turn of the millennium.