Astrobolism

Hey, guess what, my story “Bow Down Before the Snail King!”, originally printed in Swords v Cthulhu, was reprinted at Lightspeed Magazine and now you can read it for free:

I’ve so far read two of the four large parts making up the mosaic novel Sisyphean by Dempow Torishima. It’s remarkable, easily one of the wildest science fictions I’ve ever read. Its method is to tell extreme bio/body-horror stories using the jargon of our world, so in the first segment, fifty foot tall amorphous “company presidents” fulfill work orders from “clients” while the protagonist, a lowly worker, toils at horrible grisly projects. At one point they meet a vastly tall and horrifying “crossing guard,” part of a “non-profit organization” (because there’s no profit in having anything to do with it.) Everything is riddled with parasites known here as “tenants”. It’s great.

Found my favorite passage in the book so far: a ghost talks of a jeweled individual he calls “Lavish”, describing in increasingly frenzied language a world of decadence, wealth, and decay. It’s great.

Reached the point of focus, common to the experience of reading Cisco novels, where I learn how to read it (except maybe Unlanguage, which always felt unfamiliar).

The penanggalan is named! Not just my imagination, then. I wonder how widely known this reference is, beyond people who love monsters, both folkoric and D&Dish?

I’m writing mainly to call into notice some resonances with other Cisco novels. I have just read a passage about magical finances that recalls very strongly the ecstatic jargon of Unlanguage, and the adventures of the rogue physicist Assiyeh, hunting a floating vampire head with a tranquilizer gun, remind me of the pulp action elements of Member.

A character enters the narrative here I wish to remember: Eugenio Urtruvel, whose tongue has been replaced with a parasitic sea louse (the first known occurrence in a human).

We move into a section narrated by some of the other injured economists. First comes the second professor Long (there are two Longs) who constantly makes statements and then contradicts himself, and also visually interprets people as bundles of non-living objects (cones, cylinders, black bananas). Two handy tics for identifying otherwise unlabeled narration -- I will be on the lookout for further economist narratives.

Long 2 tells a story of meeting a bunch of physicists, who don’t seem to be as highly regarded as economists in this world (?), ending with a story of one of the physicists hunting down a flying head monster trailing intestines. It’s definitely an instance of one of the more wonderful folkloric creatures, the Penanggalan. I can’t remember if I first heard of it in the context of the Dungeons & Dragons (the Fiend Folio!) or not.

Chapter 2! It’s a short one called “In For Questioning” and it introduces a character I’m fascinated to learn more about: Superaesop. Superaesop is a reluctant or antiwork worker who is trying to get a job at the secret zoo. His name hints at animal fables, of course, but maybe something more? Just a taste of this very intriguing voice so far, must see what comes next.

Some neon metaphors in here, which beam out and demand you notice them.

There are teeth shining black as milk, and a while later, a building blazing black as snow.

This resonates of course with another strange thing from the early part of the book (a field of study at the peculiar secret zoo), which I didn't mention because I wasn't sure how it fit in: this is the idea of black albinos, animals which switch back and forth between being black and being white, and at the moment where they are just between they are invisible. I realize now I should pay very close attention now to all occurrences of black and white in the text... as the title of this first chapter?/volume? is "Albino Blacks"...

The idea of "dark economists" who study necromantic texts surrounded by the mummies of their mentors is something I dearly hope is explored in greater length.

"Although unavailable for analysis the moment it happens, being struck a violent blow on the head is a very interesting experience."

I'm fifty pages or so into Animal Money (LFP, 2015). It's one of two Cisco novels I have yet to read, the other being The Wretch of the Sun. I started it a few years ago and the sheer size of the thing defeated me; this time I'm going to use some sneaky techniques to read it all.

One of the very first things I notice is a wonderful trick, though it's not apparent as a trick at first: the name of the city where this is taking place, a long and complex name which is mentioned twice in the book's third paragraph, is spelled two different ways. I'm allergic to typos and so it sticks out instantly. When the name is mentioned again a while later it follows one spelling, and bit later, the other spelling, so here I am flipping back and forth, trying to figure out which is correct. Eventually all is explained: the language of this place is fluid, and nobody can agree on how it's spelled. It's similar to a technique that I've noticed Cisco use in all his writing, the use of strikingly odd or even "wrong" imagery, which forces you to pay extra close attention, so when it resolves into meaning the writing achieves an extreme vividness.

(Oh: I should also mention the cover of the book, which features art by Mat Brown: it's wild. Not sure if tumblr's rules would allow it to be posted? It's highly detailed line-art colored with pastels, showing various animals, dinosaurs, naked and partly deconstructed people, blobs of viscera, and geologic forms. It's one of the most striking books covers I've ever seen.)

Onward into the text. The story starts with the narrator, a professor of economics named Ronald Crest (a grand, faintly ridiculous name, fitting his pedantic yet/thus faintly funny voice), describing his head wound resulting from being mugged, which has prevented him from fully taking part in an economics conference, for which he has traveled to a strange foreign place. It turns out that several other conferencees have all suffered various seemingly random head wounds as well. This group of bandaged economists form the nucleus of the opening section.

There are three (main) points of weirdness in the opening pages. The first and second come close together. One is the nature of the country where the conference is. It's still a little vague, but San Toribio seems to fit the mold of "weird tropical colony where they do things differently" -- the best example I can think of is Kafka's penal colony. Mixed in with this weird setting (weird even to Crest and the other economists) is the very matter-of-fact weirdness quickly revealed about the wider world. It's also still a little vague, but this seems to be a world where the economist holds a very high social position, or maybe a cloistered one. It's at least somewhat our world (Crest teaches at CUNY and wrote a book about Cahokia) but also, economists are distinguished by mathematical marks on their faces, have to wear certain clothing, and must take ritual oaths. So right away there are two oddly meshing strains of weirdness, one weird to the reader but not the narrator and the other weird to both.

A third strain of weirdness quickly arrives when the injured economists, having decided to hold their own mini conference while they recover in their hotel, invent the truly bizarre concept of "animal money." What a gloriously odd idea: it suggests two things, both of which are lightly poked at in the early pages, one being money used by animals -- the economist share anecdotal evidence of animals in the wild starting to use money, bluebirds paying a crow with specks of glitter to ward off sparrows, for example -- and the other being a living currency that evolves, breeds, and dies -- whatever that could possibly look like! This idea is weird to everybody.

Then the strains of weird start to knit together nicely, when it turns out that in San Toribio there is a "secret zoo", where animal money can be observed, as well as bizarre and grotesque punishments involving chimpanzee sex assault that brings back to mind Kafka's penal colony but, ah, is kind of worse.

Like a lot of other people, I've been obsessed with the videogame Dark Souls since some time in 2012. (And with its sequels, and with Bloodborne.) I've spent hours upon hours playing all four games, gleaning pretty much every scrap of lore and story from them, but since the Souls games are, in the end, a limited resource, I've occasionally gone searching for the elusive "novel like Dark Souls".

I'm not alone: if you try out variations on that search you'll see threads, on reddit and elsewhere, of others trying to find one. The usual answers are the manga Berserk (I've read the first few volumes, and visually, at least, they're a clear influence) and the stories of H. P. Lovecraft (whose cosmology partly inspired Bloodborne, sure, but whose tone couldn't be more different) but nothing I've found really matches.

(My own best suggestions are Jesse Bullington's The Folly of the World, John Crowley's The Deep, and Michael Cisco's short story "The Depredations of Mur".)

Anyway, there aren't many, and so I thought I'd try writing a Souls-like novel myself. It's tricky. It might be impossible. It's probably not even a very good idea. But here's what I've got:

Polymer (Eraserhead Press, 2018) is a novella of about 80 pages that draws in part from my experiences playing and thinking about the Souls games. The atmosphere is unlike Dark Souls in that Polymer's city of Sickleburg and its parasitical Castle are neon-hued, and much more heavily tinged with the bizarre, though I did borrow/translate a few scraps and images here and there. What I mainly tried to capture in Polymer, though, is the weird experience of being a fan: of searching everywhere for lore, of squabbling and collaborating with other fans, even of watching someone far better than you stream a playthrough, exploiting glitches you never knew existed.

I'm sure Polymer isn't going to be exactly the Souls-like novel that every reader might want (and which I'm not convinced can possibly exist) but I'd totally love it if someone did that same search I did, found Polymer, and it ended up being something they didn't even know they were looking for! So if you want to take a look, you can order it here: https://www.amazon.com/Polymer-Caleb-Wilson/dp/1621052559 .

“A small figure scuttled out of arched, looming obscurity. Count Nothing was before him, swaying and prancing, fingers to his lips, green in the light of his own candle. ‘Courtesy and honour,’ he chuckled, pryingly. ‘Such as they only bring men ruin. Remember Jesus, who sacrificed himself for men by bringing them fire from heaven, and for this was crucified by God.’“ -- The Lost Lands, Peter Vansittart.