I won't post much about Readercon, because by this point most of the people who care have already done so, or have already read about it. I'll note that highlights include finally meeting Laird Barron; drinking into the small hours in my hotel room with Barron, John Langan, Michael Cisco, and Eric Schaller; meeting R. Scott Bakker, author of the astonishing The Prince of Nothing books; talking about writing, and writing horror, for a few hours in a nearly empty bar with Livia Llewellyn while everyone else was at the Meet the Prose party; and giving a reading which went a lot better than I expected. I didn't see enough of several people, like Jeff Ford, Paul Tremblay, Ellen Datlow, and F. Brett Cox, and I missed the ceremony at the end, thereby losing my chance to talk to Nick Kaufmann and Sarah Langan, but that's the way these cons go. (Oh, and I finally gave my extra copy of the first season of The Wire to Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, after promising it to them for months.)

I wanted to mention one reading in particular, though. At about 9:30 pm on Saturday night, Michael Cisco staged a "guerilla reading" in one of the unused convention rooms. For whatever reason, Cisco was not scheduled a time by the con organizers, and so his friends made sure he had the opportunity. By its nature it was unadvertised and therefore attended only by a few of his friends, but I'll tell you this: those of you that missed it missed what was arguably the best reading of the con, by one of its most criminally underappreciated writers. 

Cisco is currently in the eye of a little dust-up regarding his public calling-to-accounts of his publisher, Prime Books. While this has stirred some useful discussion, I hope one of the chief results of it all will be some new readers of Cisco's work. It's dense, sometimes difficult work, and it demands the reader become an active participant in the process. But it's deeply rewarding, and the language is sometimes breathtaking in its beauty. Here are some sample paragraphs from "The Genius of Assassins," the story he read at Readercon (a son is reading excerpts from his dead father's journal):

'the low sun white and cold, and full of worms. Then a fan of white, gelatinous rays, transparent tubes whose ends mouth the earth. A flat, white opening in the sky, whose light silvered the air, dotted with their shadows. They are the larvae of the sun and will become themselves stars.'

I had seen this light around my father -- vividly I see it now, cold and white, as he sits in his shirtsleeves, the long cuffs bent back, writing; heavy ropes of smoke coil around him. His creased face is drawn, inert, his writing hand palpitates like a bug on the paper.

'My brain shining in the dark like a planet, streaked with long, glistening white clouds that I came to see were worms, beneath the meniscus of brain fluid a translucent sheet under which they tossed and turned. Some lay and some reclined on the tissue, like opulent ladies on perfumed sofas; their puckered heads swayed gently.'

It's the perfect marriage of beauty and horror, which I respond to so enthusiastically as a reader. This is exalted prose, a Blakean glimpse of Hell. (You can find it in Leviathan Three, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre.)

It's not surprising that Cisco isn't widely read. As Nick Mamatas said in one of those links provided above, "It's the sad and annoying part of writing densely packed fantasy horror whose antecedents are nineteenth century continental fiction and philosophy as opposed to, you know, Stephen King." Still, it's my hope that he'll look into podcasting some of his stories, or excerpts from his novels. His reading voice is superb -- cadences are carefully measured, rising and falling as the story requires; every word is articulated and precise. There was a flatness of affect to this particular delivery that served to underscore the chill in the words, but was never in danger of becoming dull or tedious. He's one of these rare writers whose stories, good as they already are, are improved by his own dramatic interpretation. Fortunately, I cannot help now but hear his careful, quiet voice when I read his work.

But until that day comes, don't just settle for reading the back-and-forth he's instigated regarding Prime Books; read his work. Take a chance and order one of his books online. He deserves it. So do you.