Together these things make the book so dense that it feels more like reading 500 pages rather than the actual page count of 250. There are also certain sections that just seem endless. Furthermore, developments are often subtle, requiring you to really engage with the text. I know I said I like Cisco’s prose, and I do, but The Tyrant piles on a huge number of intricately constructed descriptions. Primarily, it’s because the book is more than a bit of a slog to get through. But it’s only a 3.5 for me for a number of reasons. I found the setting wonderfully bizarre, the protagonist was a satisfyingly complex character, and the plot actually made me give a damn, and thus The Tyrant is one of my favorite works by Cisco. Despite the story's implications I was actually rooting for her by the end, and that’s something that not many books make me do. I was continually impressed by how Cisco subtly reminded you that Ella, though she seems older because of how she has hardened herself against the world, is still a teenager experiencing her first love. While I wish that the book had spent a little more time developing the early stages of the romance, otherwise this love story works well in giving the story structure even as things gets stranger and stranger. As the back of the book blurb reveals, The Tyrant is a love story. In the second half she travels the globe, and other places too, in search of the titular Tyrant. In the first, more grounded half of the book, wunderkind Ella is conducting research. We explore this world at the side of our protagonist Ella. As we get deeper into the book the setting gets more and more surreal and over-the-top until by its ending the setting makes Halloween Town from The Nightmare Before Christmas seem tame by comparison. This is only the world as it stands at The Tyrant's opening pages, however. To its inhabitants it is no more than humdrum reality. The world of this story is a strange one filled with gothic horror, but its most peculiar eccentricities like ectoplasm, alchemy, and other worlds filled with the dead are just another thing to be scientifically analyzed. Having proven himself capable of writing realistic situations so well, Cisco wastes no time in revealing the supernatural elements of The Tyrant's setting. It's just a great piece of writing, completely tethered to the real world. If you've ever had to use that system, you can imagine the risks someone with braces and crutches faced in the days before things were handicap accessible, and the determination and assertiveness someone would have to have to make it work. In its opening pages The Tyrant depicts Ella, a teenage prodigy crippled by polio so that she has to use crutches and leg braces, trying to navigate the New York subway system. The Tyrant shows that, if he wanted to, Cisco could write amazing realistic fiction as well. Furthermore, and more importantly, his books are incredibly, fascinatingly weird, so weird that some of his strangest works become hard to follow. His writing tends to have lots of descriptive prose such that some readers probably find it prolix. The Tyrant is another showcase of that talent. While I've yet to find one of his works that fully clicked with me, the books of his I've read make it obvious that Cisco is so talented that he should be orders of magnitude more popular than he is. But then I look over and see that Michael Cisco, an endlessly inventive writer with an absolute mastery of prose, is so obscure that even most well-read people have never even heard of him. I'd like to believe that readers recognize greatness, so that all the best books have been preserved and no masterpieces have been lost to the sands of time. If you are a non native English reader get a dictionary (or get the ebook, the built-in dictionary will help a lot) and Good Luck! Some paragraphs in the book are a page long and sometimes it feels like the product of automatic writing. Overall it was a strong and a unique reading experience. Then there were times that I really hated it and I wanted to throw it out of the window. No wonder that he gets so much praise from other writers of the genre (you know, the usual weirdos, Ligotti, Vandermeer, Ford etc). He is an accademic writing literary weird fiction. The reader must build bridges in order to reach the text and start the dialogue with the book. It demands reader's full attention and cooperation. The Tyrant is one of the most difficult, demanding and challenging pieces of (weird/surrealistic) literature I have ever read. Hieronymus Bosch merging with Jackson Pollock. Endless descriptions of an ever changing landscape.Ĭisco is Gaiman on acid.
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