The Great Lover

by Michael Cisco, Rhys Hughes (Foreword)

He lives in the sewers... and in the black world between stations... the trains shrilly call to one another blind and massive in the dark - black rushing silence, rent by screaming trains ... Like the hideous angler fish of the ocean's deepest places, he is an otherworldly scavenger drifting in currents heavier than avalanches, slow as glaciers, a sea wasp with a bridal train of tingling nerves that drift in the sewage time and again tangling in women's dreams. From Michael Cisco, author of The Divinity Student, comes a visionary novel of eros and thanatos. The Great Lover, the sewerman, is the undead hero who nonetheless carries the torch of libido and life. Mischievous Frankenstein, uproarious cartoon demon, mascot of the subway cult, witch-doctor of feculent enchantment and weary veteran of folies d'amour, he stands, or shambles, as our last champion against the monochrome, white-noise forces of Vampirism.

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

346 pages, Paperback

First published April 14, 2011

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

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title is both hilariously provocative and slightly embarrassing to read in public. This book finds Cisco presenting his most disorienting outing yet. In some way it seems like it could be his most accessible, resembling both a Frankenstein story and a dark urban fantasy where bizarre worlds and creatures exist in a gritty, recognizable urban tableau. This basic outline won’t help much when you are reading it. Cisco’s writing is at its most art damaged and discombobulated, and inventive and beautiful. Tim Powers remixed by William Burroughs. Weird rituals, alien worlds, and surreal mayhem are what you get. This resembles another beautiful book I have recently read, Grace Krilanovich’s The orange eats creeps, and in a just world this book would get the praise that book so deservedly got. Rhys Hughes intro alone is worth the price of this book.

[nethescurial · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cisco at his funniest, boldest and most free-form, a psychosexual anti-genre melting pot of weird that some of its most hallucinatory digressions are almost impossible to even imagine. I always love weird with an urban tableaux like this, the sewers and grimy underworld and its cults and ghoulish denizens are described so fucking well in such a way that Cisco makes his awareness of pulp front and center, yet also pushes the line of so oneiric that none of the genre elements weight it into any sense of predictability at any turn - this is a truly psychedelic novel, and one the most free-associative of surrealists would have well admired. The protagonist is a demon-ghost-zombie-vampire-wraith and the ending is an absolute mindfuck. Though that could also be said about a plethora of other standout moments [really, the entire book is like diving into a vat of lysergic acid]; the titular character's alien excursion toward the spellbindingly detailed City of Sex; the gang wars in the tunnels, rife with a welcome dose of underclass warfare against authorities; the absolutely disorienting focus on switches between third and first person, dreams transitioning into other dreams and entirely different brains back and forth throughout the novel to where it's impossible to keep up; I love this absolutely kaleidoscopic indulgence and I can trust Cisco to deliver it to me reliably. A lot of fun to be had here, if you liberate yourself from needing everything to make sense and just traverse the dreamlands at your discretion [it helped to read it slow for me; a 350 page book took me nearly three weeks].

One thing I think Cisco could stand to improve on is his lack of interiority for female characters as well as his male-dominated casts, and though Vera is a mostly well-conceived characterization of a disabled woman she is seen ultimately almost entirely through mens' eyes, though it does seem Cisco is conscious about the enabling effects of this, as the protagonist's unwarranted obsession is a self-aware portrait of patriarchal obsession that's ultimately as deconstructed as the actual postmodern text is. And there does seem to be an apotheosis for Vera in the book, but the impact of its thematic relevance and weight is sort of swept up by the larger, completely free-dream construction of the larger text at play here, so its potential impact is perhaps obfuscated. Multiple readings might reveal more nuanced details to the gender politics here, but nevertheless I can't help but notice the amount of named male to female characters here are basically 9:1, and it's not too dissimilar in other works by Cisco.

Despite that grievance, this book does fucking rule. It's probably one of the most unique "horror" novels to come out in the 21st century so far and it only adds another point to Cisco's scoreboard as far as New Weird goes. This is definitely for the sort of person who doesn't seek concrete answers and are meant to sort of tie everything together with your own completely subjective interpretation - or do as I did and just submit to the atmosphere of the totally singular world being created here and live inside a completely madcap prose painting for 346 pages. It rocks!!!

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my favorite Cisco book, to be sure. The power of Cisco is his imagination and his ideas, his kryptonite is vague or opaque prose that just drones on, eliciting little response or reaction while reading. This book is full of Cisco-ian kryptonite and made it hard for me to enjoy, or work through, as is often the case when I read Cisco's books. Some say Cisco is under-appreciated or under-read or some other under-adjective, but I would disagree. He is none of those things for readers who enjoy reading as an experience instead of reading for an experience. His prose is dense and extremely difficult to follow nearly all the time. He almost seems to write for his own edification and just happens to be able to find publishers to offer his writings to others for perusal, maybe even enjoyment. I wasn't overly fond of the concepts underlying this tale, and found quite a lot of the narrative bloated and uninteresting, two words I rarely use for Cisco. There are some gems here, but they are rare, unnecessarily rare, and the rest was just so-so. Still, I am unsurprised, as I don't expect to love all of Cisco's books equally.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's like nothing I've ever read, except it's kind of like Flann O'Brien's "The Third Policeman", Steve Ayelette's "Accomplice" stories, Richard Brautigan, Yasutaka Tsutsui's "Salmonella Men on Planet Porno", and the films of Guy Maddin.

It's a surreal, post-modern vampire story. Only there are no vampires in it (just Vampirism). And it's not Post-Modern, it just uses Post-Modernist techniques (that is, according to the introduction).

If these statements sound like they're full of contradictions, then that's also kind of like reading "The Great Lover" (where characters are always dying, seducing, decaying, and generally in a constant state of flux).

I loved it, I hated it. I was enthralled and electrified, and lost and baffled and bored. But the EXPERIENCE.

[Matt Gonzalez Kirkland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh man, where to begin?

Well, to start - this is without a doubt one of my favorite novel-length-fictional-things ever written. What's it about? What is it? Uh...

-the semi-straightforward story of a person who falls thru an open manhole cover & dies, gets possessed by some sort of demonic force and reanimated, falls in love w the blind daughter of a cult leader/mystic, goes on a psychedelic mission to gain a magical object to aid said cult, fights against the forces of death and fascism, and gets hit by trains and knocked into sewers a lot
-an ecstatic ode to the forces of life in all of its most humble and scorned forms (subway rats, dirty pigeons in grimy alcoves, panhandlers, subway musicians and eccentrics, mold, filth, bacteria, etc etc) vs death (stasis, nothingness, void, paying off student loans and going to your shitty job, etc etc)
-an overtly 'experimental' novel that repeatedly underlines the constructed nature of the narrative/characters/fiction but somehow still keeps you giving a shit about said characters and narrative
-one of the few novels that ACTUALLY FEELS like how a nightmare/dream/psychedelic trip is experienced within your own body on a page-to-page/sentence-to-sentence basis
-uh, the most incredible homage to PUBLIC TRANSIT and GARBAGE and WEIRD CITY GRIME ever (I don't think I've ever read more perfect descriptions of, say, the exact way that the nasty gunk that builds up between the wooden ties of the train tracks in the subway looks)?
-a glorious bataille-inflected abject repulsive/joyous/hilarious book-form looney tunes cartoon
-all this and a bag of chips

I love this book so much that I fear recommending it to people because it would be unfair to expect everyone else to have the experience I did with it. I feel like being a New Yorker helps: it is a VERY NYC book although it is not explicitly placed there; no way the subway described in the book is anywhere else - honestly there are scenes in there that exactly pull me back to being 20, stoned and hyperalert to strangeness, waiting for the J train at the old decrepit Chambers street station at 2 AM, watching the late night garbage/repair trains go by (which BY THE WAY ARE PERFECTLY DESCRIBED IN ALL THEIR FUCKIN WEIRD MAJESTY IN THIS BOOK). The tone of the book is miraculous, switching on a dime between ornate, dense, descriptive passages that remind me of idk Poe or Melville or M John Harrison or something to loose, funny, jarringly 'normal' dialogue or exclamations.

I keep wanting to paste in some incredible passages or quotes from the book (there are endless perfect scenes and moments) but am held back because they all truly work best in context; the flow is a part of the magic of the novel. I keep coming back to a line I read in a review of this book (maybe in Weird Horizons?) describing it not a novel per se, but as a text written with the goal of DOING SOMETHING to you and your perception, like a spell or trance-inducing hypnosis monologue or something, and that feels really apt. That also means that the book can be slow going - but NEVER in a way that feels like a slog; page by page it has given me more pleasure and surprise than almost any novel I can think of - it just means that it requires a different headspace and level of focus than your typical novel.

I LOVE THIS FUCKIN BOOK; if ANY of this sounds like it would be remotely of interest to you, I cannot recommend it enough.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one was probably my least favorite Michael Cisco so far. It still has all the elements that draw me to his work, and does some very fun things linguistically (changes narrative tone/case mid sentence, and yes, for a reason; complex sentences that hurt the brain; more stuff). It's got some truly bizarre characters and plot. It sometimes feels like the best Saturday morning cartoon absurdity. But man, it was a little bit of a slog. I had to set it aside for a couple months before wrapping up the last few chapters, which ironically were some of the fastest sections of the book. But yeah, overall, even my least favorite Michael Cisco is still a very enjoyable read.

[Brent Hayward · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some pretty cool nuggets buried under waves of extraneous prose that eventually made me glaze over; I discovered it didn't really matter where I started reading from when I picked up the book. This was the second Cisco I've read and both were in need of an editor and copyeditor who could stand up to the mad Emperor who seems to be running rampant through a lot of new, strange fiction these days. Or maybe I should just stop trying to read these sorts of books. Maybe this is the literary equivalent of wearing pj's in public and using Auto-tune for vocals and I'm an old man who should stick to Henry James. Already The Great Lover has appeared on several 'best of' 2011 lists. I know for certain that a lucky customer at the local used bookstore will be incredulous to see it on a shelf, wondering what fool parted with it.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Along with Cyclonopedia, the most inventive and genuinely strange horror novel I've read in the last five years.

[Des Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I admit that this real-time review of “The Great Lover” is as a result of a single reading. That is unquestionably not enough. Still, *I* am not enough, however many readings I may be able to give it.
“The magic door opens and I go through it into someone else’s dream.”

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of its observations at the time of the review.

[Gaze Santos · Rating 4 out of 5]

As usual for anything written by Michael Cisco, this was a very synaesthetic experience, making an accurate description of the characters and plot difficult to describe. The main character of the story, referred to in the story as "The Great Lover," is another fantastic and towering creation by Cisco. Following in the footsteps of The Divinity Student, The Golem, and The Tyrant before him, they almost Archetypes for universal yet highly specific experiences.

Succinctly as I can, in this particular narrative, we mainly follow The Great Lover is recruited by a group of Subway cultists to make a haven and a new God for himself and the other denizens of the subways and tunnels, deep under the unnamed city. They sought him out specifically because of his awesome powers, for you see, The Great Lover is actually a Demon of sorts. He is the ruler of the sewers endowed with cartoonish abilities. A scatological Bugs Bunny in a derelict, militant world plagued by Vampirism. (Note that I do NOT mean vampires!) Through the creation of a new underground god, Ptarmagent, Duteronome, and others of the Subway Cult hope to escape. Along the way The Great Lover manages to help create a Prosthetic Libido for a scientist that ends up affecting the overall plans of the Subway Cult in an unexpected way.

The title itself is obviously supposed to refer to the main character, but taking it as a title rather than name, it can be applied to many of the main characters in the book. Such as the Prosthetic Libido, Ptarmagent, or even Ptarmagent's daughter Vera. The multi-faceted idea of love abounds throughout the plot, along with those of decay and excrement.

Even after writing the summary above, I realise that I can't adequately describe the plot or chacaters so easily. I am convinced that due to Cisco's writing style, others will gather a slightly different interpretation of the narrative. Its a visceral yet abstract way of writing that is akin to dreams and synaesthesia. There were also many moments of self-awareness as a narrative that make for a unique reading experience. As difficult as the characters and plot are to fully comprehend, Cisco is always able to anchor his style in conjuring abstract feelings into the reader. Reading his novels are always more of an experience than a story. There is a narrative, but not in the way that perhaps most people would understand as such. Much like William S. Burroughs or Milorad Pavic, Michael Cisco has created his own stylistic mythology which is utterly unique.

[Charles Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. Harrowing. Wild. Sensitive and insightful. Mind bending. Strange. Did I mention wild? Loved it.

[Barrita]

No sé qué pensar o cómo calificarlo.

El otro libro de leí de Cisco (The Tyrant) me gustó mucho y se me hizo muy interesante, y éste tiene elementos similares pero es más caótico y absurdo... si es eso posible.

Si me gustó y prometo pensarlo unos días y volver con una calificación oficial y una reseña más pulida porque creo que lo merece totalmente, pero no tengo idea de cómo explicarlo.

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Това, в ожесточена конкуренция с The Troika на Степан Чапман, е най-трудната за обяснение и шашава книга, която съм чела. Мога с еднакъв успех да й сложа както пет звездички, така и една. Затова - компромис.
Макар да признавам, че имах проблеми с връзката с героите, тайно подозирам, че Майкъл Сиско е гений.

[Gnome Books · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish it were written in rhyming quatrains!

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contrary to what you might expect, this book is not about a singular human being who is exceptionally good at loving.

[Roxanne]

Based on the review in the summer 2012 issue of Rain Taxi, I would not like this book.