Steve Erickson has been lauded as an heir to the great American postmodernists. He shares their paranoid vision, and his asymptotic approach to genre fiction recalls a tradition, comprising the likes of Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster, that has always paired erudition with the clear promise of fun.

Mr. Erickson’s newest novel is not his best, and it appears as a modest paperback original. Its publisher specializes in foreign novels, particularly in Italian noir, but “Zeroville” (Europa Editions, 329 pages, $14.95) fits the list. A Hollywood thriller with a metaphysical plot, the book’s suspense hinges not on any domestic act of sex or violence, but on an otherworldly — or at least European — sense of mythical revelation.

Its eccentric hero, Vikar Jerome, is “cineautistic.” Raised by a Christian obsessive whose favorite Bible story is that of Abraham and Isaac, Vikar decides to leave home before his father gets any ideas. Having escaped the sacrificial knife, Vikar takes a six-day bus ride from Philadelphia to Hollywood. Before leaving, he shaves his head, and on the way stops to have Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylortat tooed onto his skull. Having discovered cinema comparatively late in life — his upbringing was very sheltered — he rolls into Los Angeles in 1969, a West Coast Travis Bickle, avant la lettre.

And like De Niro’s taxi driver, Vikar begins to feel that he is the only person in the big city who takes anything seriously — or in his case, the only person who takes cinema seriously. “I’m in the Movie Capital of the World,” he says, “and nobody knows anything about the movies.” To his complete consternation, everybody thinks the people on his head are James Dean and Natalie Wood.

Vikar wanders around Hollywood like a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court, suffering the fate of all misplaced consciousnesses. Like a time traveler, he is upbeat, helpless, and tries not to trust his own disappointment. In 1969, everybody is getting high and listening to “the Music.” Of all the songs on the radio, the only one Vikar gets is about a dog. (The singer is Iggy Pop, whose idiot-savant posture resembles Vikar himself.)

As time passes, Vikar will find aesthetic fulfillment in the rise of punk, and, professionally, in the art of film editing. His idiosyncratic, self-taught style will eventually win him a special jury prize at Cannes. He develops a dedicated chiaroscuro worldview, believing each face to have a dark side and a light side, and, as an editor, he sacrifices visual continuity to toggle between left and right perspectives. Like Mary Gaitskill, who in “Veronica” has her fashion-model heroine remember the past as a jumble of almost-identical negatives, Mr. Erickson has his character respond to the ambiguities of the ’70s and the ’80s with a notably visual metaphor. This is a generation of novelists for whom film studies is a basic part of cultural literacy, and for whom postwar popular culture is a natural field for moral inquiry.

That inquiry, in “Zeroville,” amounts to a very simple question: What is devotion worth, when the people who make the objects of veneration are vain, ignorant, and blasé? “There’s a difference between a movie life and a Hollywood life, ” says one character, and it is Vikar’s “cineautistic” chutzpah to try to live a movie life in Hollywood. A less cartoony character might have been able to assimilate the working cynicism of a company town into an enriched appreciation of the movies themselves. But Vikar looks for a more tangible validation of his quest.

Ever since he saw his first movie, Vikar has suffered a recurring dream. He sees a sacrificial table, like Isaac’s, inscribed with a Hebraic script. He transcribes the script, and shows it to an expert who tells him that he can’t have just dreamed it up. Indeed, he has seen it. Through the course of his adventures on the Hollywood job market, he steals and accumulates prints of classic films, all of which seem to include the dreamed image as a single frame, a cell, a subliminal image that only Vikar has been able to recognize, thanks, Mr. Erickson suggests, to his idiosyncratic faith.

What this faith means — for Abrahamic religions and for the silver screen, and what it has to do with Montgomery Clift, with a mysterious actress named Soledad, or with her fatherless, Christ-like daughter Zazi — serves to keep the pages turning. The abstruse mysticism of this novel paradoxically makes it accessible, though the revelations are too peculiar to Vikar to involve the reader in anything like the titillations of “The Da Vinci Code.”

But inside the thriller of “Zeroville” is a love letter to a culture. It is not aimed at the movies so much as to a particularly punk kind of stubbornness, a bittersweet taste for a town in decline that Mr. Erickson has a knack for capturing, as in this Blade Runner moment: Vikar is listening to the Clash sing about Montgomery Clift — “Is he alive? Can he still feel?” — while staring out over the Los Angeles nightscape. “The city tumbles at his feet, a grand catacomb of neurons.”

blytal@nysun.com