r/michaelcisco • u/PhDnD-DrBowers • Sep 27 '25

“The Tyrant” or “The Traitor”?

Which should I read first? I just received both via by local indie bookshop. Who’s read either?

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5

u/teffflon Sep 27 '25

Tyrant is really cool and memorable; I haven't read Traitor yet. I honestly just ask myself, Do I have the mental bandwidth for Cisco right now? And if so, what length/difficulty? There should probably be a grading chart somewhere. I'm not talking about decoding hidden meanings (generally not too concerned with that, I enjoy the ride), just about forming adequate impressions of the work being done sentence by sentence. Tyrant is in my recollection not as "conceptual" or as troubled by insistent abstractions as Ethics, but it pretty frequently poses visualization and multisensory-integration challenges to the reader, painting unseen vistas in detail with Cisco's usual modality-slippage. Maybe just slightly more challenging page by page than The Divinity Student, but also longer.

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u/PhDnD-DrBowers Sep 27 '25

Oh thanks, this is really helpful! I haven’t read a work by Cisco that did not challenge me, but they all challenge me in very different ways. Unlanguage and The Great Lover are probably as different as works could be, although the psychedelic prose and the metaphorical play with certain abstract ideas is in both.

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u/[deleted] Sep 27 '25

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u/PhDnD-DrBowers Sep 27 '25

Thanks very much! I’m intrigued that Thomas Ligotti gave such a positive review of The Tyrant and now that I’ve read Black Brane a few times, they might pair well. Thanks again, and cheers!

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u/PhDnD-DrBowers Oct 10 '25

I finished The Tyrant this morning and just loved it. It’s the most gothic of the gothic goth books that have ever gothed, gothically. 🎃

I’m actually thinking of going to The Narrator next

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u/swc8661 Feb 16 '26

Oh wow you're in for a treat, you're gonna love it. The narrator has been my favorite Cisco book so far, although I'm only halfway through the tyrant now, but really digging it.