In 2014, Cisco’s translation of Julio Cortázar’s short story “Headache” was published at Tor.com. That sense of unease here is more subtle but no less present–a welcoming and disorienting ride that’s at once escapist, satirical, and brutally self-aware. This is relative: the novel is close to 800 pages in length, and if its setting seems to be somewhat similar to our own world, Cisco periodically jolts the reader out of any sense of complacency. Animal Money, his latest novel, may well be the most accessible work of his that I’ve read. Previously, I’d taken in Celebrant and The Narrator, both of which blended elements that wouldn’t be out of place in more traditional fantasy stories with unsettling narrative elements–hints that the setting might be a dream or a hallucination a juxtaposition of the sense of wonder that often comes with the fantastical with a growing unease a halting sense that something is very, very wrong. Animal Money is the third of Cisco’s novels that I’ve read. There aren’t many writers for whom you could plausibly argue that their longest, most sprawling work also serves as the best introduction to their work–but then, Michael Cisco is not (as the saying goes) most writers.
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