Barry Lee Dejasu in conversation with Michael Cisco

Join us on Wednesday, April 19th at 6:00 p.m. for a conversation between local sci-fi authors Barry Lee Dejasu and Michael Cisco.

Black City Skyline and Darker Horizons by Barry Lee Dejasu

“Though I happened to read most of these stories in a snowbound country house over a chilly winter weekend, I don’t think it was entirely the cold that made me shudder.”—From T.E.D. Klein’s foreword

Barry Lee Dejasu published his first weird stories only a few years ago, but he has already emerged as a strong and vital voice in contemporary horror fiction. Born in Providence, R.I., erstwhile home of H. P. Lovecraft, Dejasu transfers the terrors of Lovecraft’s day to the contemporary world of computers, smartphones, and the Internet.

A Halloween party goes hideously awry in “Penumbra.” A hapless tenant in an apartment building discovers cosmic terrors in the laundry room in “What’s Below Beneath.” Sinister tales of a walking dead man wandering the highways are the focus of “He Walks This Road at Night.” An abandoned movie theater is the focus of strangeness in “Projector.”

In all his tales, Dejasu reveals an understanding of the psychology of fear, lending his narratives a distinctively disturbing quality. And his deft prose, his vibrant portrayal of character, and his skill in the gradual build-up of a horrific scenario go far in making Black City Skyline one of the most accomplished debut collections in recent years.

Pest by Michael Cisco

"A rivetingly strange novel in which Cisco mixes game theory, serious philosophy, SF, and dark fantasy into something at once unreal and really entrancing. Kind of like what might happen if Wyndham Lewis decided to write like M. John Harrison and had Martin Heidegger as his editor. MEMBER is a complex, compelling work."—Brian Evenson

Pest presents the bizarre events that lead a new, parallel life for a man named Chalo as a wild yak living in the Himalayas.

Chalo the man is recruited by a latter day prophet named Grant to design and build a campus on Catalina Island, where initiates will be trained to receive a celestial visitor, the "Ancient Newborn." Chalo the yak reflects on his human past while the annual rut looms ominously nearer and nearer. The struggle to fund and construct the campus is complemented by the psychoactive changes of the yak breeding cycle, and the mating battles that Chalo will have to participate in. Both involve creating something that will outlast Chalo's individual life, and give it meaning. Both will also involve telluric forces, demons recruited by Grant to overcome sinister fiduciary magic, which cross-link the two halves of the story.

Michael Cisco is an American writer, Deleuzian academic, teacher, and translator 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. His novel The Great Lover was nominated for the 2011 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel of the Year, and declared the Best Weird Novel of 2011 by the Weird Fiction Review. Other fiction includes the short story collections Secret Hours and ANTISOCIETIES. He teaches at CUNY Hostos.