
Friday, May 27, 2011
5.27.11

Monday, April 11, 2011
4.11.11

Publishers Weekly:
The latest phantasmagorical offering from Cisco (The Narrator) is a fusion of dark fantasy, literary fiction, and existential horror that revolves around the eponymous character of the sewerman, an undead tramp in search of capital-L Love who can enter into women's dreams. As he pines for a blind woman named Vera, he also helps a disgraced academic turned prophet to establish a "ptochocratic" cult that wants to create its own reality underground and battle a soul-sucking plague of white noise. The surreal narrative is something like a 400-page T.S. Eliot poem: otherworldly, lyrical, deeply philosophical, and supersaturated with extraordinary imagery and ideas (like the Prosthetic Libido, a golem-like device constructed to house a scientist's unwanted desire). Fans of stylish and thematically sophisticated weird fiction should seek out this mad testament to Cisco's visionary genius.
The Great Lover is available
HERE
Read about it here
... or here.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
1.16.11
... in time to see him lowering from his lips a half-chewed human leg. (It was his mother's, judging from the tattooing). In the next instant, he had bolted for the treeline.
We pursued him as best we could, back through heavy timber, back to that lone sentinel-like rock I had so often glimpsed from a distance. As we approached it, I could see that every flat surface on the stone was carved with tangled occult symbols and inscriptions. IMAGOLAIRDBARRONJACKSONIMAGOBARRONOKERSTOKERSTOKERACKSON
The clearing beyond was littered with dismembered human remains in all stages of noisome decomposition. A groan rose from us all as we looked in on stark denial. Wilson recoiled from the rock and turned aside, vomiting noisily. It must have been several minutes - but, in such circumstances, what is any reckoning of time worth? - before any of us could really take notice of the Queen Anne table so neatly placed among the charnel fragments.
An immaculate dollhouse perched on top of this table. The canary-yellow walls and white trim, gay red roof and fanciful chimneys, all as clean as if it had been newly made and painted. Opening the hinged sides revealed a meticulously furnished and decorated Edwardian interior, populated by a whole menage of exquisite handmade porcelain miniatures. Their heads gleamed with unbelievably perfect coiffures of real human hair (the donors lay in pieces all about us). Several of the male figures wore waistcoats of silky human fat, and the gowns of the ladies were trimmed in a friable lace that analysis later identified as human cartilage. The faces of the dolls were painted with exacting care; the adults simpered at the rather numerous child figurines, all of whom had flat, neutral expressions, and were strangely configured, more like small adults than children.
Again that nerve-shattering whistle broke upon us and froze us where we stood। And, as before, I lifted my head to confront the cockatrice-gaze of that baleful, solitary eye, frenzied and soulless, that hell-bead of ravening malevolence, wedged in features blank with a malignancy more than daemoniacal, but still surmounting the fabulous incongruency of the gashed white stockings, the battered and mud-smeared patent leather shoes, the ragged pinafore with the dangling hem, still pink where the blackness of innocent blood had not yet stained it ...
Monday, January 10, 2011
1/10/11

Read what Jeff VanderMeer has to say about The Narrator here.
And related post, featuring a raft of reviews, here.
Also be advised that a new novel from me and the bright lights of another new publisher, Chomu Press, is on the horizon: The Great Lover. Read about it here.
The Centipede Press anthology will take the form of five slip-covered items, and is due to appear in 2012, assuming there's still a world to appear in.
More work is on the way.
My thanks to Adam Niswander et al. for the warm reception I received this last weekend at MythosCon in Phoenix, and greetings to all I met and re-met.
That is all.
Friday, November 26, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
10.26.10

"If William Burroughs was helping Cormac McCarthy rewrite Blood Meridian as dark fantasy, it might look something like this. The Narrator is wonderfully grotesque and slippery book, a meditation on the nature of violence chock-full of palpable, haunting and shocking strangeness."
- Brian Evenson, author of Last Days and Fugue State
My latest novel, The Narrator, is now available here.
Read what Nick Mamatas has to say about it here.
Read what Ekaterina Sedia has to say about it here.
Read what J.M. McDermott has to say about it here.
Read what the OF blog has to say about it here.
Read what Paul Charles Smith has to say about it here.
Happy Halloween.
That is all.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
10.10.10

We are proud to announce The Great Lover, a new novel by Michael Cisco, has been accepted for publication by Chomu Press. Expect to see more about this on their website soon.
Yet still more material is on the way. I have a new piece in an upcoming anthology and another one is in the works right now. Information will be forthcoming.
The Hedayat essay is in print.