Black Brane

by Michael Cisco

Weird fiction icon and award-winning author Michael Cisco's Black Brane, begins with the physical pain of a bad foot and later voyages into absurdity, mad science, occultism, and existential dread.

A man lying in a bed of pain flees from physical torment into his own memories, and into speculations about life and reality. He was, once, employed by the Temporary Institute for the Study of Holes, a think tank pursuing research that ranges from occult studies to advanced physics, including black holes—or, as they are known in string theory, black branes.

He meets and interacts with the various other members of the institute. Its founder, Dr. Marilyn Shitansky, a formerly homeless woman who claims to have a thinking hole in her brain; its resident occultist, the chain-smoking Daladara with his magic abacus; Ernie Allegre the engineer, who designed and built a decoherence reactor to power the institute; Dr. Liu, the string theorist; the linguist Dr. Corngholm, who can't sit still; and Dr. Shitansky's secretary, Renbrui, who seems to carry a mystery with her wherever she goes.

In memory, the speaker finds them again, in a story of physical and emotional pain, of social and quantum entanglement, that turns comic, speculative, and nightmarish. Echoing the work of Blake Crouch and Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco shows in Black Brane why he’s beloved by weird fiction and horror readers.

Genres: Horror, Weird Fiction, Fiction, Lovecraftian, Short Stories, Science Fiction, Dark

170 pages, Paperback

First published July 22, 2025

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brane is reduced from the word ‘membrane’ and it is an interface between dimensions. I can’t even imagine what it does mean. The story begins enigmatically…

My foot explodes.
My legs tremble inside their ghostly outlines, under the covers. The pain is pushing me out of moment-to-moment; I can’t follow it. The musical drone of voices and birdsongs keep reopening space, and screams begin and end on the black brane. Pain in my unblemished legs, the serene, momentless gaze pours out of my eyes and down my body again. Why does it ever stop?

The mysterious narrator works in the Temporary Institute for the Study of Holes for a certain Dr. Marilyn Shitansky… And her surname tells much… And she has a hole in her brain…

She’s large and wide, with a huge blonde head that juts forward on a stout neck; her arms barely move at her sides as she walks. She’s wearing a buff-colored suede jacket over a green shirt and white slacks, and wipes her nose with a quick flip of her finger as she mounts the steps to the door.

And it seems that the science of holes is even more recondite than rocket science… Live and learn…

Dr. Liu told me that string theorists call black holes “black branes.” A brane is where the strings begin and end. The black brane has its own horizon. It hurts. The black brane is not a point in space like a black hole. It hurts, it’s a more elaborate structure. Not just a point. Nobody’s ever seen one outside math equations.

Dr. Shitansky’s theory of being is uncompromised and unequivocal – “everything in existence comes from holes…” The aura of absurdity is rich and exotic…

…she thinks of time as being like a hole that everything comes out of, like the future is a hole the present comes out of and the past is a hole it goes into.

In the hands of fools even the study of holes may be dangerous.

[Milt Theo · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've never read Cisco before, well, this is definitely NOT the book to start with: "Black Brane" employs standard fictional techniques to provide an atypical, wildly inconsistent, multiply non-linear, reading experience, blending body horror, hard science fiction, and occult mystery in ways noone has even imagined before! The writing technique is (for lack of a better word) 'blurry': scenes fall on top of each other, flashbacks become flashforwards without warning, the pacing occasionally cancels itself out, stuttering through weird deformations of philosophy and physics jargon - and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The plot (to the extent that there's such a thing as a plot in a book that feels like falling into a black hole) revolves around a man who once worked for an institute studying holes, whose director (a homeless woman who won the lottery, studied physics and philosophy and then revealed she has a talking pencil-shaped hole in her brain) has devoted herself to uncovering the mystery of holes by studyong Levinas's "Escape" and eschewing easy summaries of her investigative devices.

Told in first-person, the man narrates his story while suffering from foot pains throughout, pains often exploding onto the page and messing up his narrative. There's no point summarizing further the book, since once the cast is introduced (his colleagues in the institute) the plot thickens, to the point that every little detail starts giving the impression of conveying some great significance, though never actually going where the indications provided might lead you to expect.

"Black Brane" (brane being the word for black holes in string theory) demands investment and terrific reading energy, offering the promise of a unique reading experience reminiscent of Deleuze, Joyce, Barker, and Ligotti. It's a cathedral made of shells you have to climb over without bloodying yourself. If you feel what I'm saying, I recommend giving yourself to the book wholeheartedly!

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

A scientist founds an institute for the study of holes -- physical, conceptual, astronomical -- with lottery money from numbers whispered by the hole in her brain, and recruits various outsiders to undertake work there. There's plenty of material for academic and theoretical weirdness in here, to the point where I expected Cyclonopedia's theories of vermicularity to be cited at some point. But compared to the other Cisco I've read, this is setup is more or less grounded mundane reality, eccentrics in mundane reality yes, but not necessarily fantastical. I don't know if this is unique to this particular Cicso or something that happened gradually in the 20 years since The Narrator. But suffice to say that the premise has a lot of implications towards the less mundane, and especially picks up when the esoteric studies bleed beyond the boundaries of the Institute, punching a hole through outer reality and narrative. It's still probably a story of how obsessions can deform one's subjective experience, really to any degree, but once that happens and experience escapes its predictable confines, Cisco is free to conjure his most memorable moments.

[S.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

*4.5 Very good, very interesting and very weird existential sci-fi/horror. I think this will merit a reread in the future so I can pick up the things I may have missed. I will say, however, that the Kindle edition I read had an unacceptable amount of proofreading errors, so that was unfortunate to say the least. Nothing like it to take you out of the spell. Highly recommended otherwise if you're a fan of Thomas Ligotti or David Lynch.

[Nesellanum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Black Brane is a discordant phantasmagoria of mysterious transient perceptions and realities.

I have very little idea what actually happened throughout a good portion of this book, but what I did fully grasp was delectably strange, haunting, and compelling. The writing was sometimes incredible, and the vivid imagery Cisco was able to create was nothing short of brilliant. I frequently found myself rereading passages in amazement.

This novella is much like a David Lynch film, in that you're not necessarily supposed to understand it, but merely experience it, digest it, and contemplate it, and I had (and will have) a wonderful time doing all three.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a fever dream, with barely a thread to hold onto to keep you from being untethered and sucked into a black hole of your own. Weird lit is my jam. But even I felt completely unmoored in this plot. If you love a twisting turning stream of consciousness monologue, this is novella is for you.

Jeff Vandermeer and China Mieville are two of my favorite authors and even I struggled to follow this narrative. That will either sell you on this completely, or steer you in another direction. I will let you decide if you haven’t found lit weird enough yet that this could be the hallucinatory story you were looking for today.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC. All opinions are very much my own.

[Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Woot woot! Michael Cisco is back with what might be his best book to date. I highly recommend this to both his returning readers and ones who have never experienced him before.

[Dre · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.66 / 5

Thank you NetGalley and CLASH books for providing this eARC of Black Brane in exchange for this honest review!

Black Brane by Michael Cisco is a mind altering drug in book form. On one page I was giggling at its Kafkaesque absurdity, its colorful assortment of characters and their silly pseudoscience enterprises. On the next I was met with sublime prose that left me (ok not literally, but figuratively) slack-jawed by emotional truths that prove difficult articulating, as evidenced by this review.

I considered not even bothering with the story’s premise because it hardly seems the point but it all begins with our bedridden protagonist who has a vague, pulsating pain in his foot. He begins a fractured account of a research center at which he once worked - its eccentric leader, his zany scientist coworkers,the secretive research involving black holes (and uh, just holes in general) and quantum mechanics, and a woman he appears to love for reasons that are not always clear. As Black Brane progresses things become more distorted, not less as the narrative disintegrates into a mad, nonlinear stew of science fiction and psychological horror.

I don’t read much stream-of-consciousness these days so this really worked out (my remaining) cognitive muscles that have waned. I could feel the synapses firing again and while I didn’t always understand what in god’s name was happening or what conclusions - if any - could be gleaned, Cisco’s novella is - if nothing else amid some of its infuriatingly ambiguous narrative - entertaining. And it's at least woven together with themes relating to trauma and existential dread.

Black Brane certainly is not for everyone and I get it. I didn’t love it, but I was consistently engaged by it and every so often, Cisco would write with a flurry that blew me away. There is a mind at work here that I respect enough to want to engage back with it. And those willing to work with his hypnotic prose and hallucinatory narrative will be rewarded with something unique, something that may prove confounding, but compelling enough to investigate or revisit.

[Dale Pearl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Black Brane by Michael Cisco: A Weird Fiction Masterpiece

Rating: 5/5 stars

Michael Cisco's "Black Brane" is a mesmerizing, unsettling novel that delves into the darkest recesses of human consciousness, blurring the lines between reality and madness. This surreal, unsettling tale will captivate fans of weird fiction, horror, and literary experimentation.

Plot:

In a world where reality is fragmented and porous, a mysterious entity known as the Black Brane infiltrates the minds of individuals, manipulating their perceptions and memories. As the narrative unfolds, Cisco masterfully weaves together multiple storylines, exploring themes of identity, trauma, and the instability of reality.

Writing Style:

Cisco's prose is characterized by:

1. Unsettling, dreamlike imagery
2. Fragmented, non-linear narrative structure
3. Philosophical and psychological introspection
4. Blending of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy elements

Quote:
"As I walked, the city unfolded like a corpse bloating in the sun, its skin splitting open to reveal a lattice of alleys, each one a fibrous tendon connecting the knotted muscles of buildings, and the streets were veins, pulsing with a faint, greasy light that seemed to seep from the very pores of the walls."


This passage showcases Cisco's mastery of weird fiction, demonstrating his ability to:

1. Craft unsettling, surreal imagery
2. Blur the lines between reality and madness
3. Explore the fragility of human perception

Themes:

1. The instability of reality and identity
2. Trauma, memory, and the power of the human psyche
3. The blurring of boundaries between horror, sci-fi, and fantasy
4. The search for meaning in a chaotic, fragmented world

Character Development:

1. The protagonist: A fractured, shifting identity, navigating the labyrinthine narrative.
2. The Black Brane: An enigmatic, malevolent entity, manipulating perceptions and memories.
3. Supporting characters: Fragmented, surreal, and often unsettling.


Recommendation:
"Black Brane" is perfect for fans of:

- Weird fiction (e.g., Thomas Ligotti, Jeff VanderMeer)
- Horror and sci-fi hybrids (e.g., H.P. Lovecraft, China Miéville)
- Literary experimentation and avant-garde fiction (e.g., James Joyce, William S. Burroughs)

Suggestions for further reading:

- Michael Cisco's other works, such as "The Divinity Student" and "Unlanguage"
- Contemporary weird fiction authors, including Laird Barron and Caitlín R. Kiernan
- Classic horror and sci-fi novels, such as "The Turn of the Screw" and "The Martian Chronicles"

Overall, "Black Brane" is a masterpiece of weird fiction, pushing the boundaries of language, narrative, and human understanding. Cisco's writing style, characterized by unsettling imagery and philosophical introspection, will captivate readers and challenge their perceptions of reality.

[AgoraphoBook Reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Black Brane 
Michael Cisco

Ok, so ...

Thomas Ligotti is one of my favorite literary horror authors. 

Michael Cisco has now taken that spot. 

Nihilistic, hallucinatory, poetic, horrific, absurd. 

If you're in to "weird fiction" trust me when I say just read it. 

Thank me later. 

5 / 5

[Adrian Coombe · Rating 5 out of 5]

First Cisco read from me, and it’s a fantastic piece of fever dream writing. It’s clear to see why he is such a revered author in the weird lit world, the prose is crisp and the story gets into your brain. Think a much odder version of Donnie Darko

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A whirlwind read from Michael Cisco! This short novel flew by. It was a little more straightforward in its writing than his usual fare, but the plot and events within were still bizarre as always.

[Ian Mond]

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.* 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.

[Wicked Words · Rating 3 out of 5]

A widower seeking to forget his painful past, Mr. Gross finds employment at the TISH Institute, established by Dr. Shitansky to study holes. During his tenure, Gross finds himself mired in a quantum entanglement with the black hole NGC 1313 X-2.

He is a prisoner, a ghost, suffering constant pain in the unrelenting void of the black brane.

With elements of occultism, science fiction, horror, and philosophy, this bizarre, stream-of-consciousness manuscript is at best Lynchian and disorienting, and at worst punishingly incoherent. Quite possibly a triumph of “weird lit”, this is definitely for somebody, I’m just not entirely convinced that that somebody is me.

Thank you to CLASH Books for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

[Dakota Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful work painting a cadence of “insanity.” Chaotic at times and a bit of a challenge, if not devoting your full attention. I will read this again and think back on it often.
I highly recommend reading this book. I found something for every part of me throughout the pages. A poignant and delicately artful take on the nature around us will often shimmer in the darkness throughout this book.
The masterful cover is just the beginning or ending. I have no clue.

[Pamela Carvalho · Rating 2 out of 5]

ARC from NetGalley
I’m sincerely sorry, but this novel was completely lost on me. A string of run on sentences of scientific jargon mostly, the plot lost somewhere in there. The beginning in particular read very strangely and felt very strange but not in a good way.

[doowopapocalypse · Rating 3 out of 5]

ARC from NetGalley

Reminiscent of VanderMeer’s Authority/Acceptance, Black Brane delves into a dimly outlined world of science. I don’t know that I found it hugely rewarding of a read.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The narrator suffers from an incredible pain in his foot and delivers his experience.

A team of very unique researchers (string theorist, linguist, engineer, an occult abacus user) are grouped in a mysterious science experiment. The Temporary Institute for the Study of Holes does not use computers or electronics and has a strict protocol when studying holes. TISH gave me the vibes of the physics students in Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness crossed with Severance Microdata refinement with a huge aesthetic dash of Ballard’s Voices of Time. Cisco’s writing is immediate, but phantasmagoric -as always. Not everything is explained in these 150 pages. There are vision hallucinations the reader is not sure if it's reality in the story or just the narrator’s tortured fever dream. Let BLACK BRANE lead you down its uncanny hole.

These may be conventional comparisons....If you have not read Cisco and enjoy the existential surrealism of Lynch, the bureaucratic nightmares of Kafka, the nihilistic narrative voice of Ligotti, the psychic delusions of PDK and want something fresh, pick this up from CLASH BOOKS.

[Maurice Crehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cisco is very quickly becoming my favourite author

[Ava · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes authors really try to push the weirdness of their work artificially and it just doesn't land. That is not the case for Black Brane -- it's authentically bizarre, from the characters to the plot to the style and language. I feel like I was watching the story through a pinprick camera and yet I was deeply invested in every one of the characters. Conclusion: black holes are terrifying.

[John Chrostek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really interesting experiential nightmare. The fear of unraveling, the impermanence of consciousness, the absurdity of reason, a sunken science fiction. Great dialogue scenes kept the quantum fever pitch grounded. Awesome shit.

Wouldn't recommend it to those who dislike ambiguity in perspective shifts, time/space jumping, those who are looking for sturdy conclusions to traditionally developing narratives, but for those who can enjoy shifting waters, not feeling actively in control of the reading experience, who doubt the given foundations of the world, it's a great time.

[Dennis Conrad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cisco keeps hitting. I absolutely love it when an author finds cosmic horror in real theoretical concepts and explores it, and this book really makes you feel the terror of the concept of a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy directing all of our movements. The way that the framing story breaks into the narrative is really disorienting in a satisfying way. If anything keeps this to a 4-star instead of a 5 it’s that I really enjoyed the characters in the TISH plotline and the way the narrative kind of abruptly casts them off - in a way that’s entirely thematically in keeping with the story’s themes and structure, to be fair - did leave me unsatisfied. And really, I’m kinda a chucklehead for that, because at this point I should know I’m not going to get anything close to conventional resolution from a Cisco work - I see what it’s doing, and I certainly respect it. But at the end of the day, getting collapsed into a black hole shouldn’t feel great - and it doesn’t.

[Honora Estes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this book felt the same way as staring at an abstract painting, trying to decipher its deeper meaning, and then upon reading the plaque finding its about Oreos.

OK so its "new weird" non-linear narrative whole sections that dont seem to make sense with each other. And the end was completely strange. Im sure there was a deeper meaning. I had to read and re-read whole portions. For a shorty it sure took me nearly the whole month to grind through.

Feeling disappointed. I think that some things can be weird without making them so abstract that they are literally inaccessible without internet breakdowns of what the author intended the book to say. I cant say that I really liked it.

[kelseyslibrary_ · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don’t ask me what this book is about because I spent the entirety of the 170+ pages asking myself the same thing and I still don’t know how to answer.

Not sure if my brain is just too simple to understand the book 🤣 or the author just purposely made the story super confusing just for the sake of it, but I did not enjoy it at all. I felt like there was no plot at all just an endless fever dream about holes. I think?

[Johnny Byutorie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was not for me I am sad to say. I'm sure there are readers that this speaks to, but this story needed a roadmap to parse. Or perhaps the frequent and chronic exhaustion that comes with becoming a new parent does not pair well with meandering excursions on string theory-related weird fiction and connected sundries.

Thank you to CLASH Books and NetGalley for this digital ARC in return for an honest review.

[The Blog Without a Face · Rating 4 out of 5]

BWAF Score: 9/10

Cisco drags you into a pain-lit fever chamber where science, metaphysics, and grief grind their teeth. It is weird in the best sense, philosophical without being homework, and frequently stunning. It’s also deliberately disorienting and anti-plot, which will lose some readers. I loved it.

Michael Cisco is the patron saint of literate weirdos, a Deleuzian academic who writes horror that behaves like an invasive species. He won the International Horror Guild Award for The Divinity Student and has racked up plaudits since, with The Great Lover nodded for a Shirley Jackson and Weird Fiction: A Genre Study up for a Stoker. Recently he dropped Pest with CLASH. In short, if you want commercial comfort food, he’s not it. If you want fiction that saws a square hole in your skull and climbs in, Cisco’s your ghoul.

Black Brane sits inside a narrator’s body like a lodged splinter. He’s bedridden with inexplicable, battering pain, convinced his suffering resonates with an astrophysical entity he calls the “black brane,” linked to NGC 1313 X-2. The story drifts between his present-tense agony and the recent past, where he worked for the ludicrously named yet fully serious Temporary Institute for the Study of Holes – TISH – founded by a philosopher-millionaire, Dr. Marilyn Shitansky, who literally has a hole through her brain and believes holes are the motor of reality. TISH builds a “decoherence reactor” to juice power from the cosmos’ refusal to destroy information. The reactor sings. People get haunted by ideas. And pain keeps muttering that everything ends on the brane. If you’re waiting for a Scooby-Doo unmasking, you will fossilize. This book is about condition, not solution.

Cisco welds physics talk to metaphysical dread until both glow. The black brane is not just a science Easter egg. It is a working symbol of helpless attraction, a surface that gathers string-ends, a horizon that drags everything into relation. The narrator treats it like a malign liturgy, a cosmic sink that tunes his nerves. When he describes the brane’s worldvolume and the way it snares vibration, the novel becomes an anatomy of pain and meaning: you are a string, the universe is a pitiless harp, and somebody else is playing.

Holes are everywhere: the literal ones in rings, records, skulls, and machines, and the figurative ones that open between people, between past and present, between any two moments when you realize memory is a liar. Dr. Shitansky’s obsession with “holes vs cavities” turns into a philosophy of attention. You can study the walls of a cave forever and still miss the cave. Similarly, you can catalog symptoms and never face pain. Cisco makes that avoidance feel like sin.

Style-wise, this is prime Cisco: long, sensuous sentences that fray at the edges, then snap into knife-points. He shifts from clinical description to lyric hallucination in a breath. Bodies are clumsy, gross, and transcendent. Sounds become topographies. There is humor too, mostly from the clerical absurdity at TISH and the deadpan way the narrator processes bureaucratic mysticism, like logging phone calls on carbon paper while a cosmic throat hums in the next room. The prose is gorgeous and exhausting and exactly right for a book that refuses to smooth out consciousness.

At heart, Black Brane is a novel of captivity. Chronic pain pins the narrator to a mattress, and Cisco asks what kind of thinking is possible when your body is a siren. The answer is not noble. It is compromised and obsessive, which is to say honest. The narrator turns to daydreaming and memory-splicing. He invents a story about the hole-obsessed institute because telling stories is the last mobility he has. Across those pages, the book interrogates science as a ritual of control. TISH tries to harness “reciprocal disjunctive synthesis” from threatened information, which is the most Cisco way imaginable to say: maybe power comes from almost breaking the rules of reality and listening to what screams. The reactor’s inexplicable music – notes that appear only in proximity, harmonies that slide like radio ghosts – is the novel’s secret choir. Is it the world singing back, or just the mind giving its suffering a soundtrack? Either way, the song is real.

Ethically, the book flirts with Levinas without becoming homework. The Other is a hole you should not plaster over. Pain yanks the narrator’s mask off and says: attend. Which is why the final image lands like a heart attack. The bed has another body in it, a shape leaking iron into the sheets, a presence the narrator refuses to look at because seeing would mean admitting the whole book’s argument about responsibility and witness. It is a brutal, perfect cut to black.

Strengths
- Atmosphere for days. The sickroom stretches into a cosmos. Even bathroom tiles start to hum with ontology. It is persuasive, immersive, and sticky on the brain.
- Originality. A chronic pain novel cross-threaded with black brane cosmology and a hole cult slash research institute? That’s fresh, even by Cisco’s standards.
- Language. Line by line this is the good stuff: tactile, musical, unafraid to be strange. The reactor sequence alone is worth the price of admission.

Critiques
- Pacing is intentionally perverse. The narrative proceeds in platelet clumps rather than clean arcs. If your blood sugar for plot dips easily, you will grumble.
- Character depth is skewed. Outside the narrator, everyone reads like a vivid glyph. That fits the theme – Otherness as a hole, not a dossier – but the tradeoff is felt.
- Expository density. A few passages veer close to a seminar you forgot to drop. I ate it up. Many will not.

It is existentially scary. The kind of horror that reminds you you have a body and it can betray you, and that the universe has the bedside manner of a glacier. The late sequence with the shape in the bed is outright nightmare fuel precisely because nothing lunges. It just is, and you have to face it, or not, and both choices hurt.

- Originality: High.
- Atmosphere: Smothering and luminous.
- Prose: Lush, gnarly, alive.
- Thematic boldness: Maximal, with teeth.
- Cinematic bait: Absolutely not, which is a blessing.

I’m stingy with 9s, but this is top-shelf weird that risks everything on voice, sensation, and idea. It is not for comfort readers. It is for people who like their horror to put a magnet inside their skull and hum

TL;DR: A bedridden narrator fuses chronic pain, astrophysics, and philosophy into a hallucinatory meditation on holes, time, and witness. Minimal plot, maximal vibe. Gorgeous sentences, unnerving images, and a final scene that curdles the blood. Demands patience, rewards obsession. Weird fiction fans, feast.

Recommended for: Readers who hear a mysterious tone in the refrigerator at 3 a.m. and take notes. Anyone who has ever stared into the hole of a vinyl record and thought, yeah, that’s a portal.

Not recommended for: Folks who need quippy teens, tidy twists, or a chapter heading that says “the monster explains everything.” Also anyone who gets hives when a book uses the word “worldvolume” without apologizing.

[Gabriel Naylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley and CLASH books for providing this eARC of Black Brane in exchange for this honest review!

3.5 Stars rounded up to 4

I've been in a couple book clubs in my time and they all run into the same problem for me. The kind of books that a large group of people want to read in a shortish amount of time are usually not the kinds of books that warrant the group discussion that book clubs can be great for. Not to say that I haven't read great books in book clubs, just saying that those books were usually crowd pleasers that say all they want to say within the text itself.

All of this to say that I wish I was in a book club that read books like Black Brane. This book is weird both in subtle and overt ways. I'll be honest my reading experience for this book was probably 3 stars there are parts that really hooked me and there are parts that I had to pull myself through which nearly killed the book for me. But the book made me think and I was always on the edge of knowing sort of what was happening in any given scene, and really struggling to see what was happening in the broader plot movements of the book as well as never really being sure what the book was doing thematically. Not to say I wasn't fully unaware on either front, but being in a group discussion setting could really boost this book for me.

The characters are all at a bare minimum passable, with some of the being pretty good notably for me Gross, Renbrui, and Daladara. Gross' PoV really made this book with him being just as confused as the reader sometimes, and Renbrui and Dandara provided for some of the best scenes in the book.

If you are looking for something weird and have a group to read this with or like questions I would recommend Black Brane. I plan on reading more Cisco after this promising outing.

[DustyBookSniffers - Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was super excited to get an ARC of Black Brain by Michael Cisco. I’ve heard so much about how wonderfully weird his writing is, and yep… it absolutely is. This was my first time reading Cisco, and it was a ride.
The book follows a man lying in a bed of pain, escaping his physical torment by drifting into his memories and big thoughts about life and reality.
It’s strange, it’s layered, and it’s the kind of story that feels like it’s happening in a dream you can’t quite shake. The writing has that stream-of-consciousness, phantasmagorical feel, so you’re never entirely sure what’s real or imagined. I’ll be honest, I had to reread parts because I didn’t want to miss anything. It’s not a straightforward book; you have to go with the flow and let it pull you along.

Since I’m still pretty new to weird horror, this might have been a bit of a deep dive for me, and I’m not sure I caught everything. But I still enjoyed the experience, and I can see why people love Cisco’s work. It promised to be weird, and it delivered on that.

If you like non-linear, surreal stories where you feel lost (in a good way), this is right up your alley. For me, it was an interesting read, even if I’m still figuring out how to get my head around this style. I’m glad I gave it a go, and I’m curious to try more weird lit and see where it takes me.

Thank you, NetGalley and Clash Books, for supplying me with an e-ARC in exchange for my honest review.

[Ula (avibrantmind) Kaniuch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to Clash Books for providing an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

If a fever dream were written down, it might feel something like this story. It’s surreal, abstract, and often disorienting, blurring the lines between pain, memory, and speculative science. The narrative doesn’t follow a traditional path, instead pulling the reader into a fragmented, dreamlike reality where meaning ebbs and flows.

The themes—existential dread, the limits of understanding, and the interplay of science and the occult—are fascinating and layered. The writing style mirrors these ideas, looping and spiraling in ways that feel deeply tied to the protagonist’s experience of pain. At times, this approach feels immersive and intentional, almost like an invitation to step into their fevered state of mind. But the repetition of phrases and ideas can dull their impact over time, making the narrative feel less dynamic in places.

This is a story that leans heavily on atmosphere and abstraction, encouraging readers to surrender their need for clarity and simply experience its strange, unsettling world. It’s a bold, unconventional style that might not work for everyone, but for those who enjoy experimental, thought-provoking fiction, it’s an experience worth exploring.

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was well written, albeit confusing at times. I felt much like I was being challenged as I read it which both appealed and disillusioned me from continuing.

I think the author's writing is fantastic. The imagination practically jumps off the page and the story really is very good. As my first foray into experimental./weird fiction I think it was a fantastic introduction as the quality of the writing is very much there.

I feel it's important to be aware of what you're delving into with this book in order to ensure you are pleasantly surprised rather than the alternative, and perhaps it was my mistake that I started reading without full knowledge of the genre.

Overall, I do have friends I will be recommending this too but, due to no fault of the writing, the genre is an acquired taste and perhaps not for the mainstream reader.