Pest

by Michael Cisco

Pest presents the bizarre events that lead a new, parallel life for a man named Chalo as a wild yak living in the Himalayas. Chalo the man is recruited by a latter day prophet named Grant to design and build a campus on Catalina Island, where initiates will be trained to receive a celestial visitor, the "Ancient Newborn." Chalo the yak reflects on his human past while the annual rut looms ominously nearer and nearer. The struggle to fund and construct the campus is complemented by the psychoactive changes of the yak breeding cycle, and the mating battles that Chalo will have to participate in. Both involve creating something that will outlast Chalo's individual life, and give it meaning. Both will also involve telluric forces, demons recruited by Grant to overcome sinister fiduciary magic, which cross-link the two halves of the story.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Fantasy, Bizarro Fiction, Weird Fiction

250 pages, Paperback

First published March 21, 2023

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

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Those familiar with the fiction of Michael Cisco should not be surprised to find a rare treat within these pages. For those new to his work, I would say enjoy your trip, both figuratively and literally.

Pest is a wonderful experience of intertwining dreamlike paths of the same character named Chalo.

Chalo the man goes through a surreal journey with absurd characters with the aim of completing a project on Catalina Island.

Chalo the yak takes you deep into to the Himalayas, igniting the senses and what it is to be a yak. I’m sure you’ve never thought two seconds about this, but you’ll be glad Cisco has taken the time and done it for you.

.

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you don't hear from me after reading this, it's because I've transformed into a yak.

[RG]

Not rating as I dont even know what I just read.

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Mom, Michael Cisco smoked so much crack that he thinks he's a yak again. Make him stop."

[Jeroen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pest is a book that starts out strange, and then only gets stranger. It starts with the story of a man, Chalo, who wakes up in the body of a Himalayan yak. He has eyes on the sides of his head, munches grass and stares at the sows in his herd. It is a calm life, at first. All the complex human problems dissolve in the pliant, brownish void between his eyes. Except that his testicles keep pestering him as the annual rut looms nearer and nearer. Chalo is also a man with brain damage lying in a Los Angeles hospital. Chalo struggles against the whole yak business to remember his previous life as a human, as if the yak reproductive cycle is a strong psychoactive state that twists his whole perception of the world.

As a human, Chalo was asked to design and build a campus for a religious sect, on Catalina island. The sect believes that soon, a godlike entity from outer space will visit Catalina island and the campus must be built to help them to get ready for their Special Guest. But that was in the past. Right now, while Chalo is a yak, he is also in a hospital with brain damage. The doctors give a name to his condition: Catalina syndrome, which apparently happened to many people at that place and involves people losing control over their bodies. So, what happened out there? Did the Celestial Visitor arrive at the campus on Catalina and do something?

The novel gets steadily weirder. It felt pretty grounded so far, but Chalo starts talking about the cult’s surfer dude leader, Grant, and how he apparently can see the immediate future. He talks about Grant’s efforts to procure a loan for the cult campus, but in doing so has to contend with evil fiduciary magic (a throwback to the economic magic in Cisco’s novel Animal Money). There is a fantastic chapter in which Grant and a bank employee have a wizard fight in which vacuous financial magic battles vacuous surfer hippie magic. Grant also hires a psychotic woman to translate Tibetan texts for him, but she keeps having daydreams about murdering everyone around her. And then, it gets even weirder. Extra-dimensional entities start interfering with Grant’s efforts, who will become his acolytes in the sect. The timeline is broken as Chalo the yak channels some extra-dimensional figure to change something in his timeline but also through him in the timeline of his past as a human. There are major metaphysical realities and rules being explored that Grant tries to surf with his surfer hippie magic, but most of it will remain unexplained. There is only strange and fantastical imagery, making regular fantasy novels feel like child’s play. I don’t know how Cisco does it.

In both of Chalo’s lives, as an architect and as a yak, he is compelled to create something that lives on beyond himself. The completion of the sect campus for the celestial visitor is an orgasmic act of creation that is given to Chalo in a vision during a seance full of masturbation. The whole novel is full of sex as a representation of creation and transformation. The creation of the campus is told in tandem with the mind-altering yak rut for procreation. Cisco’s descriptions of being a yak are full of hilarious absurdity, banal body functions and psychedelic episodes of yak hormones and Chalo’s human memories. There is both comedy and horror in this novel.

Reading this book took effort and time. I can only read so much hallucinatory writing at a time. Often I had no idea what was going on beyond the descriptions of immediate visual strangeness, but things often clicked into place afterwards as I discovered what Cisco wanted to communicate. Many of the book’s ideas are approached sidewise through these hallucinatory episodes that approach concepts, and the reader needs to put in work to try to understand the underlying ideas. And even then, Cisco uses confusion deliberately as a tool to create the feeling that the reader is participating in a ritual that is not understood, or only understood far after the fact. The book is like 10% too weird for me, but that 10% tires you out quickly. For others, that percentage may be higher, with a correspondingly faster tiring. But I can guarantee that Cisco writes fantasy scenes that you will never have encountered in other books before.

A final word of warning: Clash Books, the publisher, did a very bad job on the editing. Especially the first couple of pages have numerous copy-editing errors, but the amount of errors diminishes as one reads on. It is made hard by the fact that Cisco himself sometimes plays with text and words, so I don’t know if any of it is deliberate. In one page a couple of paragraphs are duplicated and I don’t know if it is a publication error or whether Cisco meant something with it. In any case, it didn’t achieve anything, and Cisco’s books deserve better.

[Jason Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best experienced with no roadmap, so I won't be giving one. However, reading some of Cisco's earlier fiction will give a taste. Also, I believe there's a touch of the absurd zaniness of Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds. Otherwise, plunge and and try to make sense of the cosmos with some concern for insurance, cults, surfing, yak society, and petty demons and religious mysticism. Or just surf. That's better route to Ultima anyway, though at any time you might get your head knocked in.

[Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored Michael Cisco's work. It's exactly what I want to be reading: confuse me, lose me, make me question what I am reading. Really fantastic.

[Alex Delogu · Rating 4 out of 5]

A truly psychedelic experience. Integration work required. I was thrown headlong into the madness from the get-go but my mind was burnt out halfway through by the plateau in insanity, only to resurface into awareness again by the end.

The story follows Chalo across three apparently simultaneous timelines. In one he is stricken by a new disease, rendering him chair bound. In another he is employed by a surfer guru to build a temple. And finally, in my favourite, he is trapped in the body of a yak.

My first time reading Cisco and I'm eager to read more.

There were a fair few typos throughout the book. This was quite distracting in an experimental work such as this because it fudged the possibility of distinguishing between genuine wordplay and actual typographical errors.

[Lucian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a wild trip. I have never read anything by Cisco before but this book makes me want to check out his other works. The physical copy does have some editing issues but not enough to destroy the story. Hopefully later editions will be better.

The story of Pest follows a man/yak/one seriously messed up character. I loved the yak chapters and almost found myself wanting a book that was strictly that. This book has crazy ideas like temples made from a lake of full of the sperm of madmen and other such oddities. Somehow though Cisco makes it work. This is one that I am going to need to reread sometime because there is a lot going on.

[John Collins · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my 1st novel by Cisco so I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve been reading horror fiction for decades, but when it comes to “weird fiction” as a genre by itself, I’m pretty new to it.
What Cisco does so well is layer and paint a very vivid picture word by word, sentence by sentence until it overwhelms the reader. It is as if someone had the ability to recall a psychedelic experience to the tiniest detail and put it on paper.
I’m not sure if I enjoyed this, but I can say that I’ll be thinking about it for a long time and sometimes that is the best compliment.

[Bbrown · Rating 3 out of 5]

WARNING: The hard copy edition of Pest published by CLASH Books is rife with errors. There are at least six instances of missing spaces in the first three pages alone, yet this somehow wasn't caught, which means there was zero meaningful quality control. This problem persists throughout the hard copy edition, even recurring on the penultimate page, but it's less frequent than in these first few pages. The Kindle version isn't error-free, and bafflingly it has at least one error that is not present in the hard copy, but it's the better of the two versions currently available so that's what I'd recommend you purchase if you're going to buy a copy. Considering this sloppiness evident in both formats I'll be avoiding works published by CLASH Books going forward.

It's a testament to Michael Cisco's creativity that Pest, the story of an architect of a supernatural cult campus who has been reincarnated as a yak (or maybe he's hallucinating this experience, or something in between), isn't even the strangest of Cisco's books that I've read. If anything, once you get past the opening section of Chalo-as-yak, the book starts off relatively grounded, with characters applying for bank loans among other real-world activities. Of course it’s not long before a medium uses a Messerschmitt head to transport our main characters to what quickly becomes an ocean of cum so that they can summon a group of demons named after church parts, because this is a Cisco book after all, it had to get weird sooner rather than later.

From there the plot is in full swing, and, while I’d be lying if I said I understood everything by the time I closed the book, I think I understood a lot of it. There’s even a short exposition dump around 4/5ths into the book where Chalo just sort of intuits what Grant is trying to do and the purpose of Catalina Island, which I thought was a nice inclusion for readers that are out at sea even though there’s enough information that you can pretty much figure out all this on your own. I can’t express enough how glad I am that there’s no question as to whether or not everything weird is just inside Chalo’s head. This isn’t one of those milquetoast ambiguous stories, this is one where the world is clearly insane, even if Chalo might be (and in fact by the end of the book almost certainly is) as well.

Even though I’m not able to articulate exactly what lesson Cisco intended for readers to take away from Pest, I enjoyed thinking about the concept of ritual as an act of simultaneous erasure and creation, beginning again from a blank slate. The symbols create us, not the other way around. At the same time, you can’t read the ending of Pest and think that abnegation and self-sacrifice are virtues, at least in the context at hand. One piece of life advice you could glean from Pest is that sometimes, even if you have some grand dream you’re on the cusp of realizing, it’s better to just walk away.

Unfortunately, while there are bits and pieces of Pest that I liked, I can’t be generally positive. One major flaw is that Cisco’s writing is the only thing propping up the segments of the story told from the perspective of a yak. The story failed to make me care about the yak’s struggles, and instead I was just eager to get back to the pieces of the book where Chalo is in human form. This is an especially major flaw because the opening of this book is particularly heavy with yak sections. If I hadn’t read enough prior works by Cisco to have faith that he’d do something interesting with the story, the opening might have been enough to turn me off the book. By the end of the story I still wasn’t sure the purpose of these yak sections, and I didn’t grow any fonder of them as the work went on.

Another major flaw, already alluded to above, is that the hard copy edition and digital edition of Pest have so many mistakes that it was distracting. Even putting aside the myriad unambiguous errors, the fact that it was so clear that there had been inadequate proofreading drew into question whether certain lines were intentionally written on Cisco’s part or whether they were unresolved errors. For instance, one of AC’s Tibetan translations a line reads “sweet trembling hands nothing it.” Is this what Cisco intended, or should it read “nothing in it?” I can’t be sure. Again, this problem is even more severe with Pest than it would be with most other books because Cisco intentionally experiments with his writing, so there are places where he clearly intended for words to run together, but the instances where this occurred in error muddle and undercut this artistic choice. And the fact that there are numerous errors is beyond dispute, as the mistakes are oftentimes present in the hard copy but not in the digital edition (and, in at least one case, vice-versa). Cisco’s mastery of prose is his one of his greatest strengths; the poor proofreading meant that I couldn’t just get engrossed by the book and enjoy his writing but was left constantly wondering if something was purposeful or a mistake.

Pest isn’t Cisco’s best, but if you’re a fan of his you’ll likely enjoy it. It’s good enough that it deserves some actual proofreading, and I hope that corrected editions are released somewhere down the road. 3/5.

[Richard Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

the very real made impossible with the utterly forgettable turned revolutionary i don't think I'll solidify this for a very long while but it's made me feel everything.

[Cody Lakin · Rating 5 out of 5]

PEST, by Michael Cisco, is probably the weirdest book I’ve ever read. Going into a book about a man with an unexplained parallel life as a yak, I did NOT expect that, at a certain point, the yak scenes would end up feeling normal compared to the book’s other parts. But here we are.
Part of Cisco’s author bio, on Goodreads anyway, says “He is interested in confusion.” I’m glad I read that line before entering the pages of PEST, because that line ended up serving as a guide, or a key, to understanding what this book did to my brain. There is much we can learn, I feel, from the experience of confusion, the liminal space between and before understanding.
What to say about this unprecedented work? For one, there’s no way I can properly express just how unhinged it feels as a work of fiction. It had me consistently laughing out loud, sometimes to the point of having to set the book down for a moment to gather myself, then picking it up again and rereading several paragraphs in awe of the absurdity and hilarity. Sometimes that absurdity took dark turns into the uncomfortable and disturbing. Then, at turns, there’d be something so vulnerable and beautiful, I could hardly believe the emotions bubbling within me. Not to mention how it’s all wrapped in such command of language, such breathtaking feats of prose. I read much of the book aloud to myself in order to better taste and absorb the language.
PEST seems to exist entirely in its own context; it doesn’t care if you’re keeping up, or if you understand exactly what’s happening or why. Somewhere in the middle, I realized I couldn’t engage with this story in the ways I’m accustomed to engaging with narrative, and so I gave myself to the confusion, trusting there’d be some semblance of meaning or understanding—even if only the emotional kind—by the end. There absolutely was.
Which is to say: by the end, I was in awe of Cisco‘s storytelling.
From the yak’s confusion and anticipation of the annual rut, to his loneliness in remembering his human life; from the man Chalo’s bewilderment over his life’s course and the absurdity of his companions, to his shaken sense of self, his capacity for sacrifice, and the weight of the desire and love that aches within him; to what feels, by nature of the book’s structure, like the cruelty of fate and the inevitability of time, observed from such unthinkable spaces as to render it all both funny and incredibly sad.
This is not a book to come to seeking answers, at least not the ones you’d expect. It put me through all sorts of emotions, most of them unexpected in their gravity and depth—that is, when I wasn’t reeling at some of the weirdest, even wackiest moments I’ve encountered in fiction, from the deadpan to the borderline slapstick. Into the experience of it I took the tools I’ve learned from many different mediums of weird art that I love, and it challenged me and rewarded me immensely. I feel like anything I read next will feel way too normal; in fact, I’m not sure I’m ready for any normality. I am all about that yak life now. Unsure if I require help.
Call me an excited new fan of Michael Cisco’s weird fiction. What a wild introduction this was.

[Andreas Jacobsen · Rating 2 out of 5]

A dual story of the man Chalo, who is, on one hand, an engineer of sorts that gets sucked into a mysterious building project by a charismatic surfer-type cult leader, and on the other, a human consciousness trapped in the body of a Himalayan yak.

This sounds strange. And it is.
I was invested early on, especially in the "yak chapters", in which Cisco plays with the overlap of a human and yak consciousness. Almost a direct fiction version of Thomas Nagle's famous essay; "What is it like to be a... yak?".

This was the best part of the book for me. It was interesting to see the world through the eyes of a yak; to feel mountain grass through hooves, to feel the several stomachs and tight ox-testicles. But unfortunately, the other half, about Chalo the human, went off the rails in a way that I could not tolerate. I lost almost all interest in this part of the story when a handful of very cartoonish martini-drinking demons showed up.

I have loved earlier works by Michael Cisco. I rate his incredible imagination and prose style highly. I picked this one up because I could access it easily [unlike other of his books], but this was not the Cisco that I like.

Cisco is a proponent of the weird, but this book felt more associated with the tradition of bizarro fiction, and, bizarro fiction, I was reminded, is not nearly as engaging, as it lacks the seriousness of the weird. In Bizarro the levels of silliness are higher, it is supposed to be comical and surrealist at once, and it is supposed to be fun!
Yeah, that is just not what I want out of a writer with Cisco's talent. He is much better when he takes his writing seriously. It should have maybe been a full-on yak book?

This felt to me more like a side project, a quickly typed spin-off, written with the left hand by an author brimming over with ideas. It probably should have stayed in the drawer.
Also, my version was print-on-demand, and possibly therefore, shock full of typos and layout mistakes. Which also made it harder to take seriously as a work of art.

[August Bourré · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange and amazing novel marred by the fact that the copyediting is astonishingly sloppy and the typesetting is outright incompetent. Despite buying from a reputable brick & mortar bookseller, I feel like I was sold an uncorrected proof.

[Maurice Crehan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the strangest book I've ever read in my life. A book I'm going to be thinking about for a long time. The odd moments of beauty that poked out through the strangeness at times will stick with me. Loved it.

"To remember is a transgression against holy forgetting"

[Kassandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Master and Margarita for the era of venture capital

[Tobias · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, this is a book about a man who is also a yak. Yes, this is arguably Cisco's most accessible novel. Embrace the weirdness, friends.

[Ryan Hildebrandt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A surprising amount of semen

[Anthony J Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

wtf haha