It’s my best of the year, but you can’t read it yet: Steve Erickson’s jaw-dropping next novel, Shadowbahn, which concerns the phantasmic reappearance of the Twin Towers in the Badlands of South Dakota, accompanied by the resurrection of Elvis Presley’s twin brother Jesse. And anyone who approaches the Towers hears music – but not the same song. Into this radical audacity Erickson also weaves an intensely-personal self-reckoning, a playlist for the dying American century, and his usual lucid-dreaming prose.

I’ve read every novel he’s ever written and I’ll still never know how he does it; Erickson’s not so much a writer’s writer as a tour-de-forcer’s tour-de-forcer.