A sequence in which the economists witness examples of animals themselves engaging in economic transactions moves from bizarre to absurd to sublime. For one, the economists communicate via coded phrases and have distinguishing marks on their faces. “Animal money is creative money as opposed to merely circulating money,” one of the economists says.īut for all of its headiness this is far removed from, say, Michael Lewis’s nonfiction chronicles of the finance industry’s malfeasance. The premise here is the sort of thing that could launch a dozen high-concept narratives: five economists jointly come up with a concept of money that acts with animal-like characteristics–i.e. Cortázar is one of a handful of writers whose work looms large here–there are moments of mistaken identity, sinister plots, and satirical jabs at Byzantine levels of bureaucracy that recall the mood of novels like The Winners and 62: A Model Kit. In 2014, Cisco’s translation of Julio Cortázar’s short story “Headache” was published at Tor.com. That sense of unease here is more subtle but no less present–a welcoming and disorienting ride that’s at once escapist, satirical, and brutally self-aware.

This is relative: the novel is close to 800 pages in length, and if its setting seems to be somewhat similar to our own world, Cisco periodically jolts the reader out of any sense of complacency. Animal Money, his latest novel, may well be the most accessible work of his that I’ve read.

Previously, I’d taken in Celebrant and The Narrator, both of which blended elements that wouldn’t be out of place in more traditional fantasy stories with unsettling narrative elements–hints that the setting might be a dream or a hallucination a juxtaposition of the sense of wonder that often comes with the fantastical with a growing unease a halting sense that something is very, very wrong. Animal Money is the third of Cisco’s novels that I’ve read. There aren’t many writers for whom you could plausibly argue that their longest, most sprawling work also serves as the best introduction to their work–but then, Michael Cisco is not (as the saying goes) most writers.

The narrator by michael cisco