Member

by Michael Cisco

Member is the account of how Thanks (the narrator) "accidentally recruited" himself into "the cosmic game of Chorncendantra." On a night stroll, he finds himself behind another walker who apparently dies and recovers. The bag carried by the unknown Lazarus passes into his possession. Investigating, he discovers that it contains a dimensional hole to another world. By accident or design, as bearer of the bag, he is now a courier, carrying messages in a cosmos-wide game he does not understand. Arriving at "the Artifact" (a vast and never-finished machine in the form of a world-dividing wall that manufactures time), Thanks attempts to decipher his own role in the game, to determine whether he can ever become, or already is, or never will be, a member.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Weird Fiction

380 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2013

About the author

Michael Cisco is an American weird fiction writer, Deleuzian academic and a teacher, currently living in New York City. He is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, winner of the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999.

He is interested in confusion.

Reviews

[Teodor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Certainly not a book you want to get stuck into if you're looking for a conventional narrative, but what it seems to lack in plot structure it more than makes up for in fidelity of vision and a surreal (but lucid) drive to create a vivid, at once frustratingly confusing and obliquely beautiful universe. Plenty of lazy adjectives could be used to describe Michael Cisco's story of a protagonist going by the name of Thanks who stumbles into a virtual-reality construct (or is it?) and is charged with being a 'courier', though the end result of his mission is never made clear to him by the many strange characters that populate the world/s he is made to negotiate through. Perhaps the laziest of all of these would be 'Kafkaesque', with a nod to The Castle being almost impossible to avoid.
But what Cisco creates is both instantly similar and entirely different. There's a joyful, zany kind of humour at play as the randomness of the world unspools before you - and, significantly, before Thanks, who is equally baffled by it all as we are - and it's all delivered to us in flat, sometimes downright crude language, so that the weirdness never feels affected or showy, in love with some 'avant-garde' aura it aches to project.
What makes the book a challenge - at least it was challenging at times to me, for this reason - is the fact that it's made up of one strange set piece after another, for the most part. Thanks is meant to shamble forward and deeper into an ever-more confusing world, and having no narrative thread to latch onto can be tiring. But making that leap is part and parcel of what makes the novel truly special: by straining to visualise the world Thanks is made to occupy, you become invested in Cisco's vision in a way that makes most other novels feel flaky by comparison.
And though the book seems to spring fully-formed and entirely out of Cisco's imagination, making little to no reference to the real world, the cloying virtuality that Thanks is made to suffer through (even as he returns of the 'real' world) feels like a deeply poignant commentary on contemporary life.
Certainly an experience.

[Joe Gola · Rating 4 out of 5]

The tale of a man who becomes drawn into a strange, cosmos-wide game with unclear rules and purpose. The writing is Kafkaesque, filled with dream-logic and odd imagery, while the story is by turns sterile, grotesque, dizzying and aloof. It's a difficult read at times, because the setting is so relentlessly detached from familiar human life, but the fact that such a book is readable is remarkable, I think. The mix of sense and nonsense is carefully precise, with the reader held suspended in a creepy confusion whose rules and outlines gradually become clear even if the discomfort is never quite resolved. Very few people could pull off such a trick.

A weird experience, but a memorable one.

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel means less than any others I’ve managed to read until their end, but it means more than them, too… “I say it might follow that the game isn’t done with me, and perhaps never was.”

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above is its conclusion.

[brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

it was like reading a long, bizarre dream.
good, but also confusing and frustrating at times.

[Gaze Santos · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with any Michael Cisco work, it is dense in its imagery and themes. However, compared to his earlier work this novel is less visceral. Perhaps this is due to the more abstract ideas and themes the story revolves around this time. The general idea is that Thanks, the main character, inadvertently gets himself involved in a type of cosmic game known as Chorncendantra as a courier of some kind. The problem is that Thanks does not know the rules of the game or what side (if any) he is even on. That's the plot in a nutshell, and yet in true Cisco fashion the story becomes about so much more. As a well established author of the weird, we are treated to many tangential synaesthetic moments and very idiosyncratic characters. The title, "Member," also gives a hint of a lot of the themes explored throughout the novel. The meaning of the title is explored in many iterations, from being a member of team, to the idea of body parts and limbs, to being a member of some organisation, participation as a member, etc. Game theory comes up a lot and is subverted in very surrreal ways. There is also a sense of the book as parodying the idea of life itself as a game and having "lost the game." Strangely enough, Thanks, the main character, feels quite nebulous compared to other Cisco creations... This story is also more comedic than most of his other books. Less gothic and more influenced by Science Fiction than his earlier books. Perhaps I've been influenced by the cover art, but gone is the griminess and slime of previous works, in exchange for impossible mechanisms and peppermint coloured boulders. But it still remains an unmistakably Cisco creation, and still a very, very, weird literary experience.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

“the soaring enthusiasm of an infinite will that can countenance any suffering without an instant’s reservation.”

“Do they want to lose? So is this winning? Or is this the challenge, the ‘fun,’ maintaining the impasse at the highest possible level of difficulty, both sides doing everything they can think of to wreck it?”


“An artifact like a wall that runs from horizon to horizon—that might even divide the globe for all I know—completely hidden from view by tarps and scaffolding, still under construction after who knows how many years of constant work, and nobody knows what it’s for or what, if anything, it does. Like Chorncendantra. Huge, old, ongoing, alive, engrossing everyone and demanding frenetic, purposive activity without offering anything but the promise or impression of having a purpose, absurd and solemn.”

“The admonitions to be oneself, follow one’s own law, and so on, are converted by the “angel” into phantoms of egotism, signs of a desire to stand above the level of others. There is a sleight of mind in there, which turns the impulse to cultivate differences and particularities into the impulse to see oneself as better than others, such that being different is conflated with superiority. By that argument I am morally obligated to be a conformist, but, and this is truly insidious, the idea that I want to be better entails an onerous comparison, so that now I am supposed to be striving, as one of many more or less identical examples of a given species, to be the best of them.”

[Nick Rollins · Rating 1 out of 5]

The first half of the book is a narrative-free series of vignettes that are neither interesting nor entertaining. Like if Alice in Wonderland were boring and as verbose as Dickens. There's a narrative in the middle that doesn't actually go anywhere, and leaves a lot of the details provided in the first half of the novel hanging. The the end returns to masturbatory nonsense.

Absolutely dire. I should have ditched it 1/4 of the way through, when I first concluded it was boring and going nowhere.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

What did I just read?