I’ve rarely come across so many instances where I was simultaneously in the moment of the novel but also recognizing that I was encountering images and situations unlike any I’d ever read before. These feats depend on a layering that’s extraordinary for weird fiction and is given rare power by the attention to detail in the brilliant set pieces that Cisco strings together to tell his tale. Once his unit is mobilized, Low sets off on a journey that is by turns absurd, surreal, deadly, and one of the great feats of the imagination thus far in this century. The Edak, strange remnants of a mighty imperial power, must be avoided at all costs. But first, our hero must play a waiting game in a city of cannibal queens and uncanny dead things, with priests for both the living and the dead. In Michael Cisco’s The Narrator, the narrator Low is conscripted into an army to fight against the “blackbirds,” who possess lighter-than-air armor. In short, he is one of the most interesting writers I’ve encountered in the past 30 years. Kiernan, compares favorably to that of Thomas Bernhard and, yes, Kafka. Few writers within the realm of nonrealist or “weird” fiction have created more original work than Michael Cisco, who over the course of two decades and several novels, including his critically acclaimed debut, The Divinity Student, has forged a singular path in creating visionary, phantasmagorical settings, uniquely alienated anti-heroes, and genuinely creepy happenings-while also exhibiting a healthy absurdism and dark sense of humor. The work he has created sits comfortably between that of Thomas Ligotti and Caitlin R.

The Narrator by Michael Cisco