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The Great Lover



No longer available.

The Great Lover

by Michael Cisco
Foreword by Rhys Hughes
Publication Date: 14th April, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-907681-06-6
Paperback, 346 pages


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.

About The Author

Michael Cisco is the author of The Divinity Student (Buzzcity Press; International Horror Writers Guild Award for best first novel of 1999), The San Veneficio Canon (Prime Books, 2004), The Tyrant (Prime Books, 2004), a contributor to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (eds. Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts) and Album Zutique (ed. Jeff VanderMeer), and his work has appeared in Leviathan III and Leviathan IV (ed. Forrest Aguirre). His novel, The Traitor, is published by Prime (2007). Secret Hours, a collection of his Lovecraftian short stories, is published by Mythos Books (2007). In 2009-2010, his stories have appeared in the Phantom (“Mr. Wosslynne”), Black Wings (“Violence, Child of Trust”), Lovecraft Unbound (“Machines of Concrete Light and Dark), Cinnabar’s Gnosis: A Tribute to Gustav Meyrink (“Modern Cities Exist Only to be Destroyed”), and Last Drink Bird Head anthologies. Forthcoming works include a story in The Master in the Cafe Morphine: A Tribute to Mikhail Bulgakov (“The Cadaver Is You”), an appearance in The Weird (Atlantic/Corvus), an omnibus edition of published work from Centipede Press, The Wretch of the Sun, from Ex Occidente Press, and The Narrator, from Civil Coping Mechanisms. His columns and the occasional review can be found at TheModernWord.com. He lives and teaches in New York City.

What People Say

“It seemed as if The Tyrant was the biggest monster Cisco could make, but The Great Lover is now his new masterpiece. Brilliant, light-years beyond … still marauding. He should receive plaudits for conceiving the Prosthetic Libido alone. Cisco has an identity as much as any writer I’ve read”

Thomas Ligotti

“The subterranean mindscape of The Great Lover is a cosmos entirely unto itself, a mysterious, reeking, unutterably strange, hazardous, fecund and carnivalesque digestion of events, ideas, opportunities, revelations and mutations. Cisco’s imagination is the most monumentally Tartarean of any dark fantasy writer currently writing. ”

Rhys Hughes

Online Reviews

- Publishers Weekly

- The Agony Column

- Empty Your Heart of Its Mortal Dream

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