Michael Cisco

Shown above are the eight books on my shelves by American author Michael Cisco, arranged in order of publication. At the bottom is a first edition copy of his debut novel The Divinity Student (1999) which was my introduction to his work. Above that is The Tyrant (2003) in hardback. I missed out on his novels The Golem (2004 – a sequel to The Divinity Student) and The Traitor (2007). Once upon a time I owned his first short story collection Secret Hours (also 2007) but wasn’t so fond of that one so gave it away. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by notices of The Narrator (2010) when it came out, and very much didn’t regret buying that one: first edition copies of it seem relatively few & far between now.

Also hard to find nowadays are his novels published by the Chômu Press: The Great Lover (2011); Celebrant (2012) and Member (2013). Sadly I missed my chance to get copies of these, having been persistently short of funds when they came out and then letting opportunities pass by to get them before they fell out of print, by which time money wasn’t in quite such short supply. I did at least manage to read the first two of them in ebook form. I was quicker off the mark with what has so far been his longest and most ambitious book Animal Money (2015), though only got around to buying its follow-up Wretch of the Sun (2016) last year. Small presses have been responsible for issuing all of his books to date, hence their sometimes fitful and patchy availablity.

There are still copies of the spectacularly morbid Unlanguage (2018) to be had, and likewise his second story collection Antisocieties (2021). I was surprised how much I enjoyed the latter book, given my lukewarm reaction to Secret Hours but it demonstrated that Cisco, often a novelist of excess, was also quite capable of cool restraint. I’m not aware of anyone else who writes quite like him. The wikipedia article about him suggests genre labels of horror, dark fantasy, weird fiction, surrealism and phantasmagoria, which isn’t inaccurate, but still doesn’t give the whole picture. Who else would write a macabre novella drawing heavily on the work of Spinoza with a songbird as its protagonist? – that’s what we have in Ethics (2022), which is at the top of the pile.