The Tyrant

by Michael Cisco, Rhys Hughes (Introduction)

A new novel from Michael Cisco, the International Horror Writer's Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999. "Michael Cisco's works immerse the reader in worlds that are not simply dreamlike in the quality of their imagination but somehow manage to capture and convey the power of the dream itself. The Tyrant is his masterpiece." -- Thomas Ligotti

Genres: Horror, Fantasy, Weird Fiction, Fiction, New Weird, Novels, American

252 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2003

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

[Yórgos St. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Endless metaphors...
Endless descriptions of an ever changing landscape.
Cisco is Gaiman on acid. Kafka on steroids. An unorthodox Poe.
The whole thing is a prose poem. No! A painting!
Hieronymus Bosch merging with Jackson Pollock. It's a grotesque dream!

The Tyrant is one of the most difficult, demanding and challenging pieces of (weird/surrealistic) literature I have ever read. It demands reader's full attention and cooperation. The reader must build bridges in order to reach the text and start the dialogue with the book. It is not the other way around. Cisco, for me, is a writer's writer. He is an accademic writing literary weird fiction. No wonder that he gets so much praise from other writers of the genre (you know, the usual weirdos, Ligotti, Vandermeer, Ford etc). I can not even rate the book. At times I loved it. Then there were times that I really hated it and I wanted to throw it out of the window. Overall it was a strong and a unique reading experience. It made me a better reader for sure.

Tips on reading The Tyrant.
Read s l o w l y. Also reread certain paragraphs. Some paragraphs in the book are a page long and sometimes it feels like the product of automatic writing.
Read in small concentrated doses.
Try to read it out loud, it will help.
If you are a non native English reader get a dictionary (or get the ebook, the built-in dictionary will help a lot) and Good Luck!

[Corn8lius · Rating 4 out of 5]

C’était une lecture vraiment treeees étrange et il va me falloir un peu de temps pour décanter tout ça et me faire un avis 😅

[Bbrown · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd like to believe that readers recognize greatness, so that all the best books have been preserved and no masterpieces have been lost to the sands of time. But then I look over and see that Michael Cisco, an endlessly inventive writer with an absolute mastery of prose, is so obscure that even most well-read people have never even heard of him. While I've yet to find one of his works that fully clicked with me, the books of his I've read make it obvious that Cisco is so talented that he should be orders of magnitude more popular than he is. The Tyrant is another showcase of that talent.

In a way, Cisco has chosen obscurity. His writing tends to have lots of descriptive prose such that some readers probably find it prolix. Furthermore, and more importantly, his books are incredibly, fascinatingly weird, so weird that some of his strangest works become hard to follow. The Tyrant shows that, if he wanted to, Cisco could write amazing realistic fiction as well. In its opening pages The Tyrant depicts Ella, a teenage prodigy crippled by polio so that she has to use crutches and leg braces, trying to navigate the New York subway system. If you've ever had to use that system, you can imagine the risks someone with braces and crutches faced in the days before things were handicap accessible, and the determination and assertiveness someone would have to have to make it work. It's just a great piece of writing, completely tethered to the real world.

Having proven himself capable of writing realistic situations so well, Cisco wastes no time in revealing the supernatural elements of The Tyrant's setting. The world of this story is a strange one filled with gothic horror, but its most peculiar eccentricities like ectoplasm, alchemy, and other worlds filled with the dead are just another thing to be scientifically analyzed. To its inhabitants it is no more than humdrum reality. This is only the world as it stands at The Tyrant's opening pages, however. As we get deeper into the book the setting gets more and more surreal and over-the-top until by its ending the setting makes Halloween Town from The Nightmare Before Christmas seem tame by comparison.

We explore this world at the side of our protagonist Ella. In the first, more grounded half of the book, wunderkind Ella is conducting research. In the second half she travels the globe, and other places too, in search of the titular Tyrant. As the back of the book blurb reveals, The Tyrant is a love story. While I wish that the book had spent a little more time developing the early stages of the romance, otherwise this love story works well in giving the story structure even as things gets stranger and stranger. I was continually impressed by how Cisco subtly reminded you that Ella, though she seems older because of how she has hardened herself against the world, is still a teenager experiencing her first love. Despite the story's implications I was actually rooting for her by the end, and that’s something that not many books make me do.

I found the setting wonderfully bizarre, the protagonist was a satisfyingly complex character, and the plot actually made me give a damn, and thus The Tyrant is one of my favorite works by Cisco. But it’s only a 3.5 for me for a number of reasons. Primarily, it’s because the book is more than a bit of a slog to get through. I know I said I like Cisco’s prose, and I do, but The Tyrant piles on a huge number of intricately constructed descriptions. Furthermore, developments are often subtle, requiring you to really engage with the text. There are also certain sections that just seem endless. Together these things make the book so dense that it feels more like reading 500 pages rather than the actual page count of 250. Every page read felt like an accomplishment.

Cisco doesn’t make it easy for you either, what with his disregard for common comma usage. He intentionally does not use commas a large portion of the time, which I think is intended to simulate those rushed moments where it feels like you notice ten things all at once instead of grasping a string of distinct observations in an orderly fashion. To make up an example, compare the sentence “I was at the grocery store and saw fresh apples, pears, and oranges” to the sentence “suddenly the fruit truck flipped over and an avalanche of apples pears oranges bore down on me.” Cisco uses the latter type of sentence throughout The Tyrant. Though he obviously did it for effect, and though it’s intellectually interesting, it makes an already slow book even harder to read and so I wish he hadn’t.

I always feel like Cisco writes exactly how & what he intends to write, and that’s not a feeling I often get from an author. This is not the most accessible of the books I’ve read by Cisco (The Traitor) and it’s not the best example of his unique style (probably The Divinity Student), but overall I think The Tyrant was my favorite of his works so far. I give it a 3.5, and just barely decided against rounding up. I’m going to keep reading Cisco, and once I find the work of his that I really click with I know I’m going to love it.

Edit, four years later: Since finishing The Tyrant I haven't read as much Cisco as I expected to because, as this review touched on, his works aren't exactly the easiest to get through. A silver lining to this, though, is that once you've finished a Cisco book the difficulty of getting from one page to the next fades, while the strength of the work as a whole stays sharper. Thus, while I know intellectually that The Tyrant was a bit of a slog, in my heart I remember it as a well-written and absolutely batshit crazy love story, as well as my favorite of the Cisco books I've read so far. Accordingly, I'm bumping this one up to a 4/5. It's not an easy book (basically none of Cisco's works are), but to me it's worth it.

[Liviu · Rating 5 out of 5]

As mentioned in a FBC post:

http://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com...

I started reading M. Cisco's work. I read a little from all the 5 novels I have (Tyrant, Traitor, Narrator, Great Lover, Celebrant) and Tyrant really absorbed me and while it took a few days of reading, I could not really read anything else seriously in the meantime.

Next Traitor and then Celebrant, while I plan to get the San Veneficio canon too the moment I get back home and I see myself reading all these books in the next few months, so interesting they are

Back to the book a few raw impressions and hopefully a more coherent review on FBC in July or August.

The Tyrant follows the saga of Ella, a precocious 15 year old girl, whose legs are not functional from polio, but who is an almost genius level researcher in "bio-aetherics" - what the book calls "ectoplasm" and is a sort of manifestation of the soul, the interface between living and dead.

Note that despite the familiar trappings (trains, phones, subways, cars, TV, newspapers) we are in a sff-nal world from the start.

Getting her application to study under famous Dr. Belhoria the expert in the field, Ella starts living at her mansion/research house and is involved in the observation, interaction and care of a patient (later becoming the title character of course) who hovers in-between the living and the dead world and whose vitality is so extraordinary that it allows him to straddle both worlds - at a price.

Later when things start happening we follow Ella on a journey (which again combines the mundane and the fantastic as she has to manage to get grant money, get a driver/helper etc in addition to the fantastika part) that is just as engrossing and imaginative as I've ever read.

The prose is mesmeric; while it takes a while to start understanding its rhythms, once you do I think there is no stopping in reading the novel to the end.

With its blend of real and fantastic and with a great character in Ella, Tyrant is a masterpiece of fantasy and also a very good place to start exploring the author's work as it is probably his "most accessible" book in a sense - I tend to dislike this last formulation but I think it is appropriate here as his other books all plunge you into the "deep end" from the start or are a little drier in The Traitor's case, so some familiarity with M. Cisco's style helps there

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books that you're forced to read slowly. At least I felt that way. It took me a while to get into it's flow but eventually I did and I began to appreciate it more once I did.

There's little dialogue (and what little there is is rather elliptic). The narrative contains a lot of exposition, with long descriptive passages, often laced with dream like imagery. It requires a lot of concentration and patient reading to get the most out of it.

I won't attempt to describe the plot, you can get an adequate taste of it's strange character by reading the blurb on the back, but I would categorise it as weird theological fiction. The plot is slow to unfold which might frustrate some readers who prefer the story to develop more quickly. In places it can feel positively belaboured as the author stretches out the descriptions of imagery and moods.

On the back Thomas Ligotti is praises this book describing it as Cisco's masterpiece (which is high praise indeed coming from him) and I haven't read enough of his work to comment but I can still not decide whether his style of weird is really for me.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alfred Kubin's The Other Side meets Milton and Cities of the Red Nights or Voyage to Arcturus..modern visionary literature..can't wait for more from Cisco(a new book soon supposedly)

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite a good one. A lot of passages were sublime. Some were a bit cumbersome, though. Regardless, yet another win from Cisco.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, some advice:

-This may not be your thing.
-Read this slow, if you don't the book will force you to do so.
-Read it in small, focused doses -- I split it up into four sections, about 25,000 words each and read it over the course of four days.
-But mainly, just go with it! Picture the imagery, let it wash over you, don't try to pick everything apart. It's an experience and over-analysis will make it less than it should be.

Reading this sort of writing in novel-length is a hell of an experience -- exhausting, exhilarating and fulfilling in ways that only books can be. A third in, starting at chapter six this book really takes off. From here it becomes a somewhat more earth-bound story, and more action-driven. Chapter nine is exceptionally imaginative, among the best in the book and one reason I give the book five stars. Actually this chapter is one of the most amazing things I've ever read.

I've also read Cisco's The Divinity Student, which I also gave five stars, but this is even better. I admit that early on I was thinking to myself, "I think I'll do some light reading next week!" But once I got into it, into the way the storytelling flows, I was starting to wish every reading experience could be like this. And I question, what could equal this? There's so much imagination here, so much unpredictability and delightful quirkiness. We travel along through these steam-punk-esque worlds, just waiting to see what happens next and knowing it will be a surprise. And it overflows with so much decadent detail that you can't help leaving the table feeling stuffed.

This is challenging reading, but worth it, there's really nothing quite like it.

[Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chaotic cataclysmic events you can't see. This books takes place completely on the periphery of a point of view. Everything is so obscured by something else and seen through a narrow lens that expands. Highly disorienting and nightmarish.

"These memories come wafting over in the unnatural way, with no proper point of view."

"The screen, though blank, takes on a wry expression."

";the basement lab and this room in particular are both strange and unthreatening at once, like an amusement park."

[Andy]

He couldn't finish superfluous beautiful words diluting dense meaning in every endless sentence.

[Paul H. · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the fourth Cisco novel that I've attempted to complete and will be, I suppose, my last -- on paper, this guy should be my favorite author (postmodern SF with non-cliché prose/imagery), but somehow the words and ideas just sit there on the page, inert and mildly autistic, weird for the sake of weird.

Most fatally, Cisco is just flat-out bad at writing novels -- I can imagine some sort of experimental/academic context where his ideas/imagery would 'work', but that context (whatever it may be) is the polar opposite of a novel.

[Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is wild. It’s a dark abstract exploration of poetic liminal psychedelia. An adult Alice in Wonderland for goth literati.

The book walks in a space where the plot is really straightforward, but for much of the book it’s kind of unclear what’s actually happening and even more so, why.

I just let myself trust the author to let the story unfold and see where it led. Once I was in that headspace, it is so big on vibes and beautifully written that I just accepted that I was going to see what I was going to see.

The book follows a precocious teenager whose genius is especially geared to the study of ectoplasm. Her physical disabilities concentrated her focus on her studies, and she gets assigned to a man who is constantly dying and coming back to life.

Then things get really weird.

It took me years to read this. I had to be in the right mood, I would get a couple pages into it and put it down for months. But once I was on the same wavelength I screamed through the book.

Is it all just a giant acid trip? I don’t know. But I really enjoyed it.

[Gaze Santos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hot on the heels of The Divinity Student, comes The Tyrant. A young man with exceptional astral projection abilities who becomes the focus of an experiments to try and take a peek to what lies beyond the veil of mortality. The whole story unfolds through the perspective of Ella, a young girl with an uncanny knowledge of ectoplasm. She is witness to the experiment that transforms the youth to the Tyrant, and also watches as the Tyrant proceeds to overthrow hell and heaven. And she is also deeply in love with him and realizes that it is up to her to bring him back. This is all set in a gothic steam-punk reality where death imagery is built into its very foundations.

As is characteristic of Michael Cisco, he often goes on descriptive tangents that in my opinion help to make the story more palpable, while remaining surreal. Usually these passages are an attempt to conjure a specific, idiosyncratic feeling or idea. And the descriptions are often dense, visceral and synesthetic. It is not conventional story telling in that the overall story is almost secondary to the style in which the story is told itself. There are a couple of moments when the book even references the reader themselves. Many would probably find this detracting from the book, in that the story doesn't move fast enough, but these tangents are exactly why I like Michael Cisco. As mentioned before, the ideas are very unique and weird, yet through the ability of his writing seem palpable. It's a very hallucinatory work. That being said, I found the story of this book to be easier to follow than in some of his later works, making this one of his more accessible and conventionally coherent books.

[Roberto Andonie · Rating 2 out of 5]

GOOD: Powerful, extremely original weird images. Great, creepy writing style.
BAD: Long, boring shallow story, boring characters and character development. Indiscriminately long descriptions of EVERYTHING all the time, equally. Disappointing exposure of interesting themes.

Recommended for:
People who would like to know what to do with all their extra ectoplasm.
Alchemy enthusiasts.
People who would like to read a comic book story, but are not in a hurry and would like to struggle more.

Ugh, this was such a disappointment. The first 20% or so is packed with so much atmosphere and eccentricity that it made me rise my expectations to the sky. The set up of the novel seemed so promising. Starts with such a meticulously exploration of a surreal world and exciting issues to come, only to change the pace and shallowly, uninterestingly delivering of these issues. It becomes this ridiculous story worthy of a 40-page comic book.

People compare this author to Thomas Ligotti and that is what picked my interest. Not knowing anything about this book, now I clearly realize this isn't for me, and it has almost nothing of what I enjoy of Ligotti's work. This book is only similar to Ligottis' in that both are unusual and dark, with eloquent language and bizarre scenery, i guess. But when Ligotti's books could be categorized as literary horror, with strong, resonant (if super pessimistic) themes and characters, with stories that explore a doomed human nature and its relation to the unknown, the universe, and existence, this feels like pulp literature with unconventional language.

It feels homogeneous and indistinct in the amount of time and importance the author gives to superfluous, minor events (say, the main character commuting to her office) as the more important, epic ones (... ***BEWARE, SPOILER AHEAD**** ...say, the Tyrant beating Satan... yes
this happens). Also for such an original writing style this has one of the least original and uninteresting accounts of the afterlife ever. (****SPOILER***Its a city with bad weather)

A "brilliant biologist" and a "world renowned scientist" talk like this in this book:
"Actually, I created an ectoplasmic poppet from a drop of his albumen, from your sample archive. The poppet formed a three-dimensional echo of his form in space." Its hard to link this conversation to the real world and real people, (other than maybe ghostbusters cosplayers.) let alone identify with it, at least for me (when Im not cosplaying as a ghostbuster).

Good luck if you decide to try it.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastical, sorta urban-fantasy that transitions into dark fantasy quest with incredible atmosphere, language, and confusion. (the plot is all right too but not important to me).

Trigger Warnings: Death, Desire, Decay (in the sense of buildings/cities).

Set the mood:

"Ella emerges onto the platform, looks up at the second horizon of the trees, to a black and crimson sky, belfry sable against a Halloween-orange sunset. . .where there are buildings, the skyline is dotted with urns."


I have never thought to ask others if they can think of specifics moments in time and place where they have encountered a delectable atmosphere, and if these atmospheres are as impossible to find again or remember at will as I think they are. For me, some are as simple as a particular late Fall, or an urban night ride for the purpose of photography. I have forgotten more than I remember. Some are more encompassing and abstract: the placing-on-stage around the phenomena of life. Who do I interact with, but mainly: when and where? and how does that setting look?.

I'm not big on reviewing, but I felt compelled blunder my way through a little confusing statement about Michael Cisco's writing. I don't care to persuade you. I just want to share some quotes since a lot of his books are hard to find in print (this one is not hard to find...for now).

Let's pretend this is diary entry.


Set the doom:

"Come into a town—even in the middle of January—there's an evil spiciness in the air that feels just like Halloween. . .Mournful and fiendish, abounding liveliness stimulated by an overburdening presence of death or its denial—something she associates with the Tyrant, who, standing still, oscillates life and death so rapidly as to permit a bullet to pass through is body, not without bleeding and pain but without dying. The Janus head has a mourning face and a fiendish face, and they oscillate atop the Janus body that oscillates mournfully and fiendishly dead, and fiendishly and mournfully alive. She comes to think of it in shorthand as the "mood"—a makeshift name, inadvertently the reverse of "doom", that steadily gains currency with her. Alchemic breaths of that mood sail in the winds' folds."

Evil spiciness is what I want to taste in every meal be it food or words.

"Any city, even a dead city—in fact, especially a dead city—is all dominated by desire. Wherever there is humanity there is desire, which is in each one of us, a complex that's poorly understood or not at all understood. Fickler than the wind, it operates in fits and starts, almost all the buildings have outlived the desire that fave rise to them long they are even completed, and the finishing touches are applied in a mortician's spirit. A lot like trying to prettify a cadaver for the final viewing, lots of futility and a dogged, habitual determination to make the best of things. Nobody wants to see or use these buildings any more, and no one really wants to see that corpse all rubbed with cosmetics. What they wanted in either case is something already gone. How people hate desire! They learn to distrust it—but deprive them of its convulsions for even one day and what will life look like to them then?"

This book partially takes place in an all-encompassing Underworld that includes, other than Mr. Cisco's own imagined places, Hell and Heaven. I wonder if Mr. Cisco likes the Talking Heads or if I'm looking to make any connections to alleviate my confusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZpZu...

"Oh, Heaven/Heaven is a place/a place where nothing/nothing ever happens." That sounds like a potential deprivation of desire's convulsions, but how does that look to the people? There's no clear answer as David Byrne's lyrics sound sarcastic, but his tone sounds sincere. And when Mr. Cisco relays to us the story of the Tyrant's (failed?) assault on Heaven, well, that's certainly not a "nothing" that David Byrne is singing about. Even in the Underworld there is desire. I imagine the angels are compelled to desire to keep Heaven's status quo of eternal life free-of-desire free from the Tyrant who desires....what exactly? I still haven't figured that out.

"Then the angels stand beneath the clouds in a hail of flak and bullets, sad-eyed gaze form impassive faces drop down upon the Tyrant's newest recruits....The angels turn around and their wings lock together in a solid wall spanning the heavens form horizon to horizon. The escapees have been locked out"

I think I feel worse for the angels than the escapees.



"Always—a first blush of enthusiasm and then, who cares? If only we could have a lasting enthusiasm. Perhaps that's why people resort to hoping and dreaming after objects that are so utterly unattainable. . .but then there's nothing upon which enthusiasm can sate itself. Nor is this mad strategy necessarily a bad one—even these observations are growing tiresome—all the same there is something beautiful, touching, in bearing witness as the heat and light fade out of these thoughts. That heat will leave behind a nostalgic residue, and maybe sometime, later, I'll pick up its contagion, and suddenly the whole sense of impression will be there before me again. A desire remembered too late to do anything about it, to act on, to prompt action. . .like a desire out of a past life. . .suddenly becomes sort of infinite, and you can take pleasure in it, because it summons you without requiring you to do anything, summons you without asking anything of you. You are in a position to savor it freely, and you don't owe it anything."

I've already grown tired of this entry. I had nothing to say at the start. All I can offer is an opportunity to savor some of Mr. Cisco's sentences.


"Those furtive and ill-formed fads of desire–you wouldn't even know what one of them looked like if you caught up with it finally, got a good look at it! How unfamiliar what we really want is to us. You don't even know what you want—and you don't want to know! You say 'Damn it let me sleep, I don't want to be conscious for this! Kindly let these blobs of smoke close over my head, and I will make my narcotized terror-train journey through clockwork dioramas of female anatomy. One by one the images rise up and brush by like wire and gauze ghosts on hydraulic arms, just brushing my face with perfumed hems as they drift by. 'Yes I like these artificially haunted houses the best.' You say to yourself, 'Why I've never felt so free!"

Is Mr. Cisco's work an "artificially haunted house"? Whether artificially or naturally haunted, it is as confusing as any dreamlike haunted house, and to sit in that confusion is my current "illformed fad(s) of desire".

[sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

An phantasmagorical, ectoplasmic hayride through the underworld and back. Simultaneously mundane and fantastic, horrific and dreamy. 

Undead, archangels, demons, laboratories, planchettes, goth literati, and Carl, who saves the day.

Ultimately a love story.

Side note – notice how Cisco gives beautiful attention to smell.

"...where the air streams through the part in his mouth it comes away perfumed with the smell of soot, dead leaves."

"...the dead army smells like clean laundry..."

"...she set foot in the lobby and smelled the institutional cleanser and air conditioned air and old food..."

"... brilliant vermillion fruits with a woody flesh and smell like candy syrup."

"...a burly man redolent of brylcreme..."

"Mascara and talcum smells mix in with the frosting taste of her skull."

"...this dark street that smells of perfume liquor rancid trash perspiration. "

And, just because:

"—overhead the moon is a nest of songbirds, a footprint, a footstep, a whirring fan blade, a coin, a beating heart, a top, a switch, a drum, a maze, a pearl, an ex libris, a nerve, a stage, a skeleton, an island, a gargoyle, a trophy, an oath, a canal, a nude, an urn, a hedge, a commonplace book, a palm, a country house, an oracle, a censor, a flue, a grave, medi: cine—shadows in the moonlight ... The Tyrant's army is here and—here and—here. Ghosts spin around the houses like leaves in the wind—the whole giddy air spins like a top."

Swoon.

[Nicholas Gibas · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be honest, at one point I felt like I wasn’t smart enough for The Tyrant. Dream-like and verbose it weaves the story between this world, the next world and the combination of the two. It’s a challenging read but one that does reward the reader heavily. The entire siege of heaven and hell was the standout and is worth the read alone. The Tyrant is a dynamic, yet steady story that will require a second reading. There’s sort of a depth I might not have even picked up on. This story will definitely stay with you.

[Andrea Derizio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un Barone rampante weird, però prolisso. The Divinity Student, finora, rimane il mio Cisco preferito.

[Claus Appel · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read chapters 1, 2 and 6. Silly nonsense devoid of worldbuilding.

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Mom, Michael Cisco is smoking crack in his room again, come and make him stop!"

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

05/25/2019 - unrated DNF at 20%... i was so hoping to grow into this one, as i have read so many superb reviews of this book and Cisco's writing in general... sadly for me, things never clicked... i couldn't find the plot, the point, or the direction things might eventually take, which never ceases to bother me as a reader... highly skilled writing full of imagery and descriptions and awe-inspiring concepts that ultimately just trails off into pointlessness, seemingly? i won't give it a rating (mine would be 1 or maybe 2 stars) since i think the "style" is just not to my liking, and i may in fact be stopping a masterpiece before it gets all masterpiece-y, which would be unfair to fellow readers and the author... hmph.

Time passes...

I decided to revisit this one after reading 'The Narrator', since I finally figured out how to read Cisco, which is slightly tangential to how I read other authors.
I will say this started off brilliantly. There even seemed to be an actual, definable plot. How weird! Cisco's prose is dense and visceral and full of florid and fluid descriptions. What he lacks is any idea of punctuating his text, which almost forces you to read quite slowly and deliberately, all the time. Not necessarily a bad thing, too, since there are some utterly fantastic utilizations of linguistic mastery and word play. Quite enjoyable, if making for a plodding read occasionally. What slowly started to wander away was what I thought was the plot. Ultimately, purposefully?, I was left with mostly questions, which I seriously doubt Cisco is in any way concerned about. I did wonder the purpose of The Tyrant though. Why did he do what he did? Why was he tied to Ella? Where do they go from where the book ends? Ah, such simple things to concern myself with, huh? I was fascinated with The Tyrant and Ella's similar yet wholly different powers and abilities and connections, and had to consistently remind myself he had no discernible age while she acted and though well beyond her 15 years. The Odd(est) Couple? Aside from some epic battle scenes, there is not a lot of action, though Cisco more than makes up for that with lengthy adjective-strewn phrases, well-developed scenery, and a few intriguing additional characters. Definitely an non-standard novel in its manner of telling, and anyone expecting to grasp the entirety while skimming any part of this book will probably finish (or give up?) nonplussed or quite at sea with what passed before their eyes. I will say I had to re-focus often, and even wander away two of three times, just to stay in the proper headspace I need to absorb Cisco's unassuming off-ness. A full-on struggle most of the time, but one that offers its own brand of reward.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not going to give it less than 4 stars because I really didn't give it much of a chance. I was <10% of the way through it, but it was late, I was tired (twelve-hour road trip), and it was written in a very convoluted manner. My Kindle said I still had 3.5 hours left in the book and I checked out. I may eventually circle back around to try to re-read it.

It seems to have been smartly-written, but maybe like the author was trying too hard to be an intellectual. I felt like it might be one of those books people at private universities discuss sitting in dim tea houses, smoking pipes. Isn't that what they do? I'm not sure - I went to a state school. Single sentences would take up 5 lines and only contain a single punctuation mark - the period at the end. Maybe a comma thrown in the middle somewhere. Paragraphs would fill my entire screen.

The next time I try to read it I'll make sure to have had a full night's sleep. ;)

[Barrita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tan bellísimo y tan enmarañado, creo que puede hartar o cautivar por igual.

Sépase que es un libro del género weird, que no es fácil. A veces es solo cuestión de estar de humor para este tipo de historia, que es llevada más por las extravagantes descripciones de cosas bastante inusuales que por una trama sólida.

Había leído a Cisco antes, en uno de los cuentos de The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories y allí me pareció menos extremo y confuso, pero quizá se deba al contraste con las otras historias del libro. Como sea, me gustó y una experiencia de lectura interesante.

[Janos Honkonen]

I just simply could not concentrate on this one - maybe it was the sweltering summer heat, maybe it was the page long sentences with no punctuation, maybe the fact that during the first fifth the story of the novel didn't seem to really go anywhere. I usually do love books with some heft and challenge and I don't generally put books aside, but this one just turned into a chore to read, hence not for me. No rating, since didn't finish.

[Pam · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lot of the writing is beautiful, though occasionally too bogged down in stream-of-consciousness weirdness. But the plot doesn't make much sense overall--why is he the Tyrant and why does he do what he does, where does the doctor come from, what is the Tyrant's goal in the end? Maybe asking for reasons is too much from a book that wants to follow dream logic, and maybe from the author's point of view it doesn't matter, but I prefer internal consistency in my surrealism.

[Lane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this one a lot better than The Divinity Student or The Golem. Some great surreal imagery, only this time the inclusion of discernible plot elements, such as a Tyrant overthrowing Heaven and Hell and a love story, supplied enough justification for me to enjoy those surreal images, not just wonder why the hell some guts decided to get up and chase some lady.

[Anastasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird and bizarre. Incredible prose, dense. Not much in the way of plot. It was slow going at first, but once I got used to it, it went better. I'll definitely be reading more by this author.

[Melinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just found the title of this book I read a long time ago.

[Jason Brezinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely amazing. A classic of modern surrealism. Essential if you have any interest in unconventional literature.

[Vincenzo Bilof · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going to leave an actual review soon... but this... I haven't been this affected by a book since I read 2666. Wow...