Reviews

I'm pretty confident in the claim that there's no one else in weird fiction doing it like Cisco is and as a result it's no surprise the world is still sleeping on him. The man can craft an ostensibly genre-adjacent narrative with the verve of the most imaginative dark fantasists while also reigning in a style that is as singular and inimitable as Kafka's, his writing becoming a sort of deconstructive style of pastiche that works so many alternating motifs and influences into its DNA while maintaining a singularly obsessive fervor that's unmistakably unique to Cisco. But even this voice is indefinitely flexible, less of a fixed narrative cadence and more of a rotating palette of ideas and the forms they can take that the man anchors with his own highly specific thematic motivations. "Antisocieties" proves just how damn well Cisco can make use of this seemingly innate talent of literary versatility, because each of these stories - while also upheld by a core theme of isolation - are also obsessed with language in the ostensibly limitless shapes they can assume. I think the mechanics of language is the one concept that dominates what I've read of his work so far, and here his fixation is on full display in a state more well realized than his first collection or even "The Divinity Student".

Cisco doesn't seem concerned with breaking language as much as he is bending it - exploring it under a microscope, twisting the rules at unorthodox angles within the written word, mining out the specifics of voices and individual perspective to make note of patterns and mechanisms in speech and writing and weaponizing this all to the effect of the uncanny. The most accomplished thing about this collection imo is just how different each of these ten stories is - many of them are in first person and each narrator's cadence, intonation and pattern of speech is completely different from one another, leading to a kind of human-focused weird fiction that I'm always enraptured with because I think horror, contrary to popular opinion, is about humanity at the core. This is deeply psychological weird fiction, exploring solitude through the many ways language can take shape, and the many ways that isolation manifests for different kinds of people. The perspective in "Intentionally Left Blank" feels appropriately adolescent, and likewise "My Hand of Glory" is singularly manic and fever-pitch in its delivery. And my favorite story here, "Stillville", uses voice to a heartrending effect, from a narrator settling into the emotional numbness of working life and clinging on to a fleeting moment of connection and understanding with another that is gone as quickly as it comes.

And as implicitly promised Cisco knocks it out of the park in terms of genuine dread and bizarre creepiness to an utterly scintillating effect. The linguistic obsessions are on full display in "Saccade", which concerns secret codes hidden in text, the way our brains fill in the blanks with things we do not fully understand, and utterly esoteric ideas about the workings of language and human madness, their relation to one another - this is an absolutely chilling story from front to back, evoking the power of suggestive horror as the best Kafka or Aickman stories [in fact I'd say overall this is fairly Aickman-esque, just has a bit more of an emotional resonance with me]. The title story plays at a sense of authoritative control by a faceless system, and uses linguistic gaslighting and pressure to an utterly maddening effect. Actually the best stories here all have this quality - it kinda feels like Cisco is making me question my own sanity, like the words are actual Lovecraftian aberrations I should not be aware of the existence of let alone reading. There's not many works of fiction you could say that of.

Once again Cisco impresses me - he's proven that both his anthologies and novels are peak of literary intelligence in horror fiction today, if one wishes to call this horror. I'm not sure what's next, because his work is so versatile that there's no way of knowing any which direction he could take his literary ethos next. But I've reason to believe he's not even at his peak yet, and still has a lot of interesting stuff left to explore in his works.

rpcroke's review

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3.0

I really, really wanted to like this more. Great writing but I simply didn't feel a lot when reading these stories. 5/5 for constructing dream like states and cutting off reality. Thing is, I couldn't internalize the feelings or the messages. It felt like someone telling me about loneliness and isolation instead of immersing me in it and making me feel it.