Books Read: Black Brane by Michael Cisco
I love the cover. (The book as well, but that cover is schmick!)
My Locus review for this is already out there. If you were a subscriber to the magazine, you could read it right now! Otherwise, you’ll have to wait eight weeks for the review to be published online.
With its striking cover, the short novel is a love letter to Thomas Ligotti (it’s dedicated to him). If you don’t know who Thomas Ligotti is, I’m not angry with you, I’m just disappointed. He was (and still is, Ligotti is still alive, though a bit like Thomas Pynchon, no one has heard a peep from him for at least a decade), one of the greatest practitioners of weird horror. You could say that Ligotti is an artistic descendant of Lovecraft and Machen, but that would be selling him very short. He is a master of the uncanny, of reality divorced from the rational. He can transform the natural world and industrial environments, like a factory, into places of stygian, staring into the abyss-level terror. And he does it with prose that’s dense, claustrophobic, and often free of any dialogue.
Cisco doesn’t so much ape Ligotti’s style, but he does echo the author’s appreciation of the strange. For Cisco, this is second nature. He’s been writing weird shit for decades—a good chunk of which I own but had not read until now.1 I feel bad about that because as Cisco shows in Black Brane—which involves quantum entanglement, the occult and some outlandish theories about the nature of holes. Not voids. Holes!—his aesthetic, his Ligotti-infused vision of the world, is very much my catnip.
If I weren’t drowning in 2025 novels, I’d probably spend two weeks in both Ligotti and Cisco’s worlds. But that will have to wait. For now, I recommend Black Brane if you enjoy the absurd, the discombobulated and the disturbed.
If I haven’t read his stuff, how the fuck do I know that writing weird shit is second nature to Cisco!? It’s an educated guess, OK! And a skim of the books I own.