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Bow Down Before the Snail King!
Hey, guess what, my story âBow Down Before the Snail King!â, originally printed in Swords v Cthulhu, was reprinted at Lightspeed Magazine and now you can read it for free:
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bow-down-before-the-snail-king/
Book diary: Sisyphean by Dempow Torishima (1/2)
Iâve so far read two of the four large parts making up the mosaic novel Sisyphean by Dempow Torishima. Itâs remarkable, easily one of the wildest science fictions Iâve 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 âcompany presidentsâ fulfill work orders from âclientsâ while the protagonist, a lowly worker, toils at horrible grisly projects. At one point they meet a vastly tall and horrifying âcrossing guard,â part of a ânon-profit organizationâ (because thereâs no profit in having anything to do with it.) Everything is riddled with parasites known here as âtenantsâ. Itâs great.
The second segment uses (I assume) ideas from Shinto to tell a story of cyclical reincarnation and biological drift. I believe this part takes place before the first, and think it maybe leads directly to it. Guess weâll see when I read the second half!
Animal Money (end)
So I failed at the real time review thing, but thatâs my failure alone. I finished Animal Money this morning and it was amazing. Iâm going to say this is my favorite novel of the decade. Itâs hilarious, weird to levels rarely encountered (except in Michael Cisco writings), furiously scathing, and heartfelt. Itâs about something very important and that something resonates so powerfully right now, even more than it would have a few years ago when it came out.
Animal Money (6)
Found my favorite passage in the book so far: a ghost talks of a jeweled individual he calls âLavishâ, describing in increasingly frenzied language a world of decadence, wealth, and decay. Itâs great.
Update: Cisco is on fire. Right after the passage about Lavish is another wonderful section about the lengths a professor will go to to help their students, which in this case involves pole-dancing.

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Animal Money (5)
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).
Iâll further the comparison with his other novels here. There is a difference, I feel, in that the plot of Animal Money is, so far, more describable, in that itâs more easily comprehensible than some of the others. Another novel might have been written which just displays the idea of animal money, like The Great Lover displays the idea of the prosthetic libido, but Animal Money wraps its idea in a frame of Kafkaesque academic satire which Iâm really enjoying.
Animal Money (4)
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?
Iâm 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).
(PS I have read exactly as far as when I had to give up last time. Last time I felt overwhelmed but this reading is effortless. Onward.)
Animal Money (3)
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 donât 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. Itâs definitely an instance of one of the more wonderful folkloric creatures, the Penanggalan. I canât remember if I first heard of it in the context of the Dungeons & Dragons (the Fiend Folio!) or not.
Chapter 2! Itâs a short one called âIn For Questioningâ and it introduces a character Iâm 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.
Chapter 3 is called âNonsmoking Smokersâ, and it begins by merging the habits of the economists with San Toribioâs Kafkaesque ritual trappings. An economistsâ duel, its setup and appurtenances lovingly described, and which ends up, awesomely bathetic, being a sustained jumping contest.
Animal Money by Michael Cisco (2)
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.
Dream sequences in books are often to be dreaded but Cisco's are great. I love the scene where Crest dreams he is searching for something in a used bookstore, and on the shelf labeled "CEMETERY" he finds such books as A Tales of Two Graves, We Have Always Lived in the Grave, A Clockwork Grave, Gravity's Grave, and Our Mutual Grave. I recall a game we played as a kid, scanning the library shelves and replacing one word in the title, though I can't remember what the word was we used.
Animal Money by Michael Cisco (1)
"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.
A very intriguing thing about this book is how long it is. 780 pages is pretty unusual for something this densely creative and strange. Very excited  Will report back soon with more.Â

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Polymer, The New Bizarro Author Series, 2018
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 .
(Oh, and by the way: I'm working on another novella that explores a different couple of my ideas on how to write a Souls-like novel. It's more of a straight fantasy, and with a more sober atmosphere than Polymer. If Polymer leans on monsters and lore-seeking fans, this other will lean more on oddly decayed settings and well-meaning institutions that have accidentally ruined everything. But more news on that when it becomes a finished thing!)
Baahubali 2
GOT who? LOTR what?
Quote of the day
âA 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. âCourtesy and honour,â he chuckled, pryingly. âSuch 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.ââ -- The Lost Lands, Peter Vansittart.
Iâll have some more to say about this novel when Iâm done. So far enjoying it a lot: Medieval France as an alien world.
Belated Book diary
Hunger by Knut Hamsun. Avoided reading for a long time, then devoured it in two days. It feels very modern. Surprisingly funny at parts -- like the narrator's spontaneous lie, to a random person who couldn't care less, about being the inventor of an electric prayer book that can be read in the dark -- but mostly very grim. (The narrator has a nice trick of skipping time whenever he manages to get some money for food, picking up the story when he's broke again.) The Engineer Trilogy by K. J. Parker. Read these almost one after another, just pausing in between to read each of the short books below. They were really good: dark with a clammy, queasy kind of wittiness to them. I really liked how a certain character expanded to nearly consume the entire series. Never Now Always by Desirina Boskovich. Novella by a Clarion classmate of mine. It's very painfully beautiful. The Jokers by Albert Cossery. New York Review of Books classic, about a bunch of odd mismatched souls who decide to fight a tyrant by ridiculous flattery. Not so much bittersweet as bittersour. The Twilight Pariah by Jeffrey Ford. Wonderful short novel by a favorite writer of mine: this feels like a monster movie written by a prose master. Spooky and weird.
Ten minutes later they reached the farm buildings of Rampinzèri: a huge pile, used only one month in the year by laborers, mules, and cattle gathered there for the harvest. Over the great solid but sagging door, a stone Leopard pranced, in spite of legs broken off by flung stones; next to the main farm building a deep well, watched over by those eucalyptuses, mutely offered various services: as swimming pool, drinking trough, prison, or cemetery. It slaked thirst, spread typhus, guarded the kidnapped, and hid the corpses of both animals and men till they were reduced to the smoothest of anonymous skeletons.
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard

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Sunday board game: Asking For Trobils. Fun and quick worker placement game. Very striking and original graphic design -- you wonât mistake this game for any other. Get crystals, trade crystals for space slugs, get space carrots, catch Trobils with slugs and carrots! My favorite thing about it is the âbumpingâ mechanic -- if you go on the same place as another player, they get their ship back, which gives them another action. I won by three points in our two-player game. Looking forward to trying it with more.
Happy Halloweâen!