Antisocieties - by Michael Cisco (Paperback)

About the Book

"ANTISOCIETIES is a collection of ten stories about isolation - what it does to people, and what isolated people do to each other and themselves. An ominously quiet town. A haunting young adult novel from the turn of the century. Two starving captives frozen in agony. A young boy from a doting family. A man in a cheap Halloween mask. A succession of portraits of people trapped in their own identities, some of whom insist on their own ideas because they would have nothing at all without them. People for whom being seen by another is terrifying. And, like any collection of portraits, ANTISOCIETIES is also a collection of speculative mirrors ..."--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

ANTISOCIETIES is a collection of ten stories about isolation - what it does to people, and what isolated people do to each other and themselves. An ominously quiet town. A haunting young adult novel from the turn of the century. Two starving captives frozen in agony. A young boy from a doting family. A man in a cheap Halloween mask. A succession of portraits of people trapped in their own identities, some of whom insist on their own ideas because they would have nothing at all without them. People for whom being seen by another is terrifying. And, like any collection of portraits, ANTISOCIETIES is also a collection of speculative mirrors ...

Review Quotes

"Cisco (Unlanguage) speculates on the dangers of loneliness in this darkly glimmering collection of 10 horror shorts. There's nothing in the way of a jump scare here; instead, each of Cisco's pieces drip with a subversive spookiness, using the horror genre's tension and pacing to spin tales of how quickly individual perception and sanity comes undone in isolation.The isolation of each of these unnamed narrators hits close to home in this time of social distancing, and Cisco's skillful prose conjures a hard-to-place sense of unease that lingers long after the book is closed. This is sure to appeal to fans of weird fiction and literary horror."

-Publisher's Weekly

"Michael Cisco is of a different kind and league from almost anyone writing today"

-China Miéville

"Michael Cisco's works immerse the reader in worlds that are not simply dreamlike in the quality of their imagination but somehow manage to capture and convey the power of the dream itself."

-Thomas Ligotti

"At this point, it appears Cisco is simply operating in a sphere that most weird fiction writers never reach, or attain only rarely, and is doing it effortlessly."

-Weird Fiction Review