On a Roll : Books: Steve Erickson wrote five novels in 15 years. None were published. Then his sixth book hit the big time.

Steve Erickson has an apocalyptic imagination and a one-room apartment in Hollywood.

But it’s OK, really.

At last--pushing 40 and thanks to his dark vision--he’s who he wants to be: published novelist, four books to his credit, good reviews, a growing reputation. He also has a steady job and a regular income, more constant money than he’s seen for a long time, he says.

It could be a lot worse. For 15 of the last 20 years it was a lot worse. During that long, grinding epoch of odd jobs and free-lance journalism, Erickson tapped out five novels.

Publishers wouldn’t touch any of them.

It was as if Erickson had artistic plague. Everything he wrote came back--and back and back--like rejected bargains advertised on late-night TV. Friends gently suggested that--maybe--he should try something else, give up the dream and get into 9-to-5 reality.

“I don’t know that there were a lot of times that I was stone broke but there were a lot of times when I was worried,” he says with apparent understatement. He notes wryly that “predictions I would be famous by the time I was 25 were wrong.”

Once in a great while during those 15 years a publisher would almost bite, only to dance away like a bad hallucination.

Then Erickson wrote his sixth novel and it became--in the lexicon of publishing--his first novel. Poseidon Press, a division of Simon & Shuster, brought out “Days Between Stations,” a surreal story about a man who has lost his past, in 1985.

When word came that the novel had been bought, Erickson remembers that his primary feeling was not vindication or jubilation--or any other manifestation of victory. Mainly, he recalls, he was “relieved” that the ordeal was over, that he had finally accomplished what he had wanted to do ever since he was growing up in the San Fernando Valley.

It turned out that Erickson was at the start of a roll.

In 1986, Poseidon published “Rubicon Beach,” a surreal novel with science-fiction elements set partly in Los Angeles. Reviews called it “one of the most notable books of the year,” “stark, brilliant” and “exquisite.”

The praise didn’t pay the rent. Just after “Rubicon Beach” was published, Erickson took a job in a comic book store on Melrose Avenue. He worked there for about nine months and recalls the odd sensation of a novelist selling comic books to adults.

Nonetheless, Erickson was getting luckier. An advance for his next book and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts got him out of Batman’s turf and back to his typewriter.

The result, published by Poseidon last January, was “Tours of the Black Clock,” a surreal novel of the 20th Century whose chief character is Adolf Hitler’s personal pornographer. A couple of critics had reservations on the ultimate success of the novel but nearly all agreed that it had dazzling moments. A New York Times reviewer had no doubts at all, saying the book demonstrated Erickson’s potential to become “one of the fabulous myth-makers who are needed in these times of the deprivation of the imagination.” Just this week, “Tours” was named one of the best books of the year by the Village Voice.

But that’s not all.

This fall Poseidon issued “Leap Year,” Erickson’s occasionally surreal account of the 1988 presidential election.

“Leap Year” is a quasi-journalistic effort containing Erickson’s account of his train-and-car travels around the country against a backdrop of primaries, conventions and campaigning. Reportage about events such as the New York primary is interspersed with Erickson’s reflections on the characters of the presidential candidates. For instance, his take on unsuccessful GOP candidate and televangelist Pat Robertson is deeply skeptical. “If Robertson actually believed in a god he wouldn’t exploit God so recklessly,” he writes. “His are the motions of a man sure of the void, and therefore free to fill the void with his own image, for those who follow him.”

“Leap Year,” however, is not a straightforward book. There are leaps into fantasy and into the surreal, fictional episodes, accounts of cats multiplying in his Los Angeles apartment while he is away and descriptions of his father’s battles with a series of health problems. The greatest departures from conventional nonfiction, perhaps, are the sections cast in the voice of Sally Hemmings, the black woman who was Thomas Jefferson’s mistress. Her voice is a sort of historical counterpoint to contemporary events, a sounding board from the nation’s complicated past.

When the facts aren’t enough, Erickson uses his imagination to probe the motivations of last year’s presidential contenders. In one imaginary interlude, U.S. Sen. Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee confesses he decided to become President at age 6. His rivals may have procrastinated until as late as puberty to form White House ambitions, and such delay may signal their unworthiness for the Oval Office, the fictional Gore argues. The senator also feels superior to Erickson because he has always known that the Beatles were better than the Rolling Stones.

Of “Leap Year,” the Los Angeles Times reviewer commented that Erickson’s “feel for language is a relief from either the dead newspaper prose or poli-sci jargon that lurks in election books.”

Indeed, there probably aren’t many political journalists who would take a detour from the campaign trail to see a section of Texas called “Saucer Alley” because of the UFO sightings there.

In retrospect, Erickson sees that he was shunted into such excursions because the presidential race was so overwhelmingly unexciting.

“I thought it was going to be (New York Gov. Mario) Cuomo versus (U.S. Sen. Robert) Dole, or something that would be more fun to write about,” he says, sitting on the edge of the bed that is the most prominent piece of furniture in his apartment, a long pistol shot from Hollywood Boulevard. “I also thought it was going to be a real watershed year. It turned out to be a stopgap, I think. It turned out to be a year when people put big choices and big decisions about this country on hold for a while.”

Coincidentally, Erickson himself is on hold for awhile. There’s no book in the works at the moment, but he has “a glimmer of a book on the horizon of my brain.” He may begin to write in 1991, he says, but in 1990 he plans to devote himself to his job as arts editor at the Los Angeles Weekly. He has no idea where he’s headed at the moment and “couldn’t begin to guess what my life’s going to be like in three years.”

At the moment, Erickson’s material possessions have been stripped down to a minimum, partly because he and his wife are separated, a subject he mentions only with great reluctance. But Erickson has never had all that much, apparently. Though he is somewhat reticent about his past, in “Leap Year” he reports that in 1988 he lived in an apartment near MacArthur Park, a marginal, crime-ridden neighborhood where the sound of gunshots was familiar.

Besides the bed, his current apartment contains a typewriter, electronic musical equipment belonging to a friend and several packed bookshelves. This ascetic state is partly due to choice, he says, explaining that the lack of possessions is “psychologically comfortable.”

With his shoulder-length hair and unlined face, Erickson looks younger than 39, but he confesses to at least a little burnout. “Tours of the Black Clock,” which he considers his best work, was emotionally draining, he says. It was his most intensive exploration of his moral concerns, he says, and “it unsettled me.” He adds, “I was bumping up against my own obsessions . . . I was also tapping up against my own capacity for craziness.”

The clash between good and evil is a constant in Erickson’s work. He believes that his own imagining of the psychic landscape of the Third Reich is largely responsible for the toll of writing the book.

He picked the period, he says because it was “the one moment of the century where the conflict of good and evil was clear-cut,” he says. “. . . I was astounded by how much evil people were capable of. I was still naive enough (before reading history and writing ‘Tours’) to never quite believe that people had that capacity for evil.”

As for his own sense of morality, Erickson portrays himself as an evolving creature.

“When you’re really young, you make a lot of black and white assessments about things,” he says. “Then you get into your late 20s or early 30s and you start to see all the grays and you say to yourself, well it’s all gray. Then you get to a point where you realize just how complicated it really is. There’s grays and there’s blacks and there’s whites. Some things really are black and white . . . South Africa in many senses of the words is black and white, a real clear-cut case.”

Although he doesn’t consider himself a “Los Angeles writer” in the sense that he writes about the city, Erickson acknowledges that his sense of time and space are rooted in his childhood here. Growing up in the San Fernando Valley as it changed practically overnight from semi-rural to suburban sprawl instilled in him a sense that the world can be turned upside down almost overnight, he said. In Erickson’s books, rules of time and space are often distorted in ways that conform to the stranger theories of modern physics.

Mystery writer James Ellroy, author of “The Black Dahlia” and “The Big Nowhere” who met Erickson earlier this year when Erickson was writing a profile about him for the Weekly, says the two became good friends because they shared similar outlooks on the world. Erickson, he says, is “a hopped-up, hyped-up, morally outraged man of letters.” Moreover, Ellroy found that he admired Erickson’s work, especially “Tours of the Black Clock.”

“I thought that I was being given a tremendous history lesson from the inside out,” he says. He was also struck by the facility of Erickson’s style. “I never felt that any of the metaphors were being stretched,” he explains.

Meanwhile, Erickson looks at the uncharted future and wonders about the nature of his literary fate.

“I know I’ve got more books, the question is have I got more good books,” he says. “If you’re a writer, you want to think it’s not finite, what you’re doing. But Faulkner, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Fitzgerald, you can distill all of their work down to four or five books apiece, and if you didn’t read any of the other books you wouldn’t miss much.”

Some years ago, he says, he looked at a couple of his old, unpublished novels and gradually decided that he didn’t want to leave a trace of them behind. So he destroyed them--ripped them up and threw them out with the garbage.

“I didn’t want to kick off and have someone dig them up and bring them out,” he says. “I don’t want to write inconsequential books. I think I would rather not write more books than write inconsequential books.”