Cisco drags you into a pain-lit fever chamber where science, metaphysics, and grief grind their teeth. It is weird in the best sense, philosophical without being homework, and frequently stunning. It’s also deliberately disorienting and anti-plot, which will lose some readers. I loved it.

Michael Cisco is the patron saint of literate weirdos, a Deleuzian academic who writes horror that behaves like an invasive species. He won the International Horror Guild Award for The Divinity Student and has racked up plaudits since, with The Great Lover nodded for a Shirley Jackson and Weird Fiction: A Genre Study up for a Stoker. Recently he dropped Pest with CLASH. In short, if you want commercial comfort food, he’s not it. If you want fiction that saws a square hole in your skull and climbs in, Cisco’s your ghoul.

Black Brane sits inside a narrator’s body like a lodged splinter. He’s bedridden with inexplicable, battering pain, convinced his suffering resonates with an astrophysical entity he calls the “black brane,” linked to NGC 1313 X-2. The story drifts between his present-tense agony and the recent past, where he worked for the ludicrously named yet fully serious Temporary Institute for the Study of Holes – TISH – founded by a philosopher-millionaire, Dr. Marilyn Shitansky, who literally has a hole through her brain and believes holes are the motor of reality. TISH builds a “decoherence reactor” to juice power from the cosmos’ refusal to destroy information. The reactor sings. People get haunted by ideas. And pain keeps muttering that everything ends on the brane. If you’re waiting for a Scooby-Doo unmasking, you will fossilize. This book is about condition, not solution.

Cisco welds physics talk to metaphysical dread until both glow. The black brane is not just a science Easter egg. It is a working symbol of helpless attraction, a surface that gathers string-ends, a horizon that drags everything into relation. The narrator treats it like a malign liturgy, a cosmic sink that tunes his nerves. When he describes the brane’s worldvolume and the way it snares vibration, the novel becomes an anatomy of pain and meaning: you are a string, the universe is a pitiless harp, and somebody else is playing.

Holes are everywhere: the literal ones in rings, records, skulls, and machines, and the figurative ones that open between people, between past and present, between any two moments when you realize memory is a liar. Dr. Shitansky’s obsession with “holes vs cavities” turns into a philosophy of attention. You can study the walls of a cave forever and still miss the cave. Similarly, you can catalog symptoms and never face pain. Cisco makes that avoidance feel like sin.

Style-wise, this is prime Cisco: long, sensuous sentences that fray at the edges, then snap into knife-points. He shifts from clinical description to lyric hallucination in a breath. Bodies are clumsy, gross, and transcendent. Sounds become topographies. There is humor too, mostly from the clerical absurdity at TISH and the deadpan way the narrator processes bureaucratic mysticism, like logging phone calls on carbon paper while a cosmic throat hums in the next room. The prose is gorgeous and exhausting and exactly right for a book that refuses to smooth out consciousness.

At heart, Black Brane is a novel of captivity. Chronic pain pins the narrator to a mattress, and Cisco asks what kind of thinking is possible when your body is a siren. The answer is not noble. It is compromised and obsessive, which is to say honest. The narrator turns to daydreaming and memory-splicing. He invents a story about the hole-obsessed institute because telling stories is the last mobility he has. Across those pages, the book interrogates science as a ritual of control. TISH tries to harness “reciprocal disjunctive synthesis” from threatened information, which is the most Cisco way imaginable to say: maybe power comes from almost breaking the rules of reality and listening to what screams. The reactor’s inexplicable music – notes that appear only in proximity, harmonies that slide like radio ghosts – is the novel’s secret choir. Is it the world singing back, or just the mind giving its suffering a soundtrack? Either way, the song is real.

Ethically, the book flirts with Levinas without becoming homework. The Other is a hole you should not plaster over. Pain yanks the narrator’s mask off and says: attend. Which is why the final image lands like a heart attack. The bed has another body in it, a shape leaking iron into the sheets, a presence the narrator refuses to look at because seeing would mean admitting the whole book’s argument about responsibility and witness. It is a brutal, perfect cut to black.

Strengths

• Atmosphere for days. The sickroom stretches into a cosmos. Even bathroom tiles start to hum with ontology. It is persuasive, immersive, and sticky on the brain.
• Originality. A chronic pain novel cross-threaded with black brane cosmology and a hole cult slash research institute? That’s fresh, even by Cisco’s standards.
• Language. Line by line this is the good stuff: tactile, musical, unafraid to be strange. The reactor sequence alone is worth the price of admission.

Critiques

• Pacing is intentionally perverse. The narrative proceeds in platelet clumps rather than clean arcs. If your blood sugar for plot dips easily, you will grumble.
• Character depth is skewed. Outside the narrator, everyone reads like a vivid glyph. That fits the theme – Otherness as a hole, not a dossier – but the tradeoff is felt.
• Expository density. A few passages veer close to a seminar you forgot to drop. I ate it up. Many will not.

It is existentially scary. The kind of horror that reminds you you have a body and it can betray you, and that the universe has the bedside manner of a glacier. The late sequence with the shape in the bed is outright nightmare fuel precisely because nothing lunges. It just is, and you have to face it, or not, and both choices hurt.

• Originality: High.
• Atmosphere: Smothering and luminous.
• Prose: Lush, gnarly, alive.
• Thematic boldness: Maximal, with teeth.
• Cinematic bait: Absolutely not, which is a blessing.

I’m stingy with 9s, but this is top-shelf weird that risks everything on voice, sensation, and idea. It is not for comfort readers. It is for people who like their horror to put a magnet inside their skull and hum

TL;DR: A bedridden narrator fuses chronic pain, astrophysics, and philosophy into a hallucinatory meditation on holes, time, and witness. Minimal plot, maximal vibe. Gorgeous sentences, unnerving images, and a final scene that curdles the blood. Demands patience, rewards obsession. Weird fiction fans, feast.