Black Brane (Paperback or Softback)

2025 Wonderland Award Best Novel Winner

Weird fiction icon and award-winning author Michael Cisco's Black Brane, begins with the physical pain of a bad foot and later voyages into absurdity, mad science, occultism, and existential dread.

A man lying in a bed of pain flees from physical torment into his own memories, and into speculations about life and reality. He was, once, employed by the Temporary Institute for the Study of Holes, a think tank pursuing research that ranges from occult studies to advanced physics, including black holes—or, as they are known in string theory, black branes.

He meets and interacts with the various other members of the institute. Its founder, Dr. Marilyn Shitansky, a formerly homeless woman who claims to have a thinking hole in her brain; its resident occultist, the chain-smoking Daladara with his magic abacus; Ernie Allegre the engineer, who designed and built a decoherence reactor to power the institute; Dr. Liu, the string theorist; the linguist Dr. Corngholm, who can't sit still; and Dr. Shitansky's secretary, Renbrui, who seems to carry a mystery with her wherever she goes.

In memory, the speaker finds them again, in a story of physical and emotional pain, of social and quantum entanglement, that turns comic, speculative, and nightmarish. Echoing the work of Blake Crouch and Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco shows in Black Brane why he’s beloved by weird fiction and horror readers.

Michael Cisco is an American writer, Deleuzian academic, teacher, and translator living in New York City. He is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, which won the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999. His novel The Great Lover was nominated for the 2011 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel of the Year, and declared the Best Weird Novel of 2011 by the Weird Fiction Review. His nonfiction book, Weird Fiction: A Genre Study, was nominated for a HWA Stoker award in 2023. Pest, a novel, was published by CLASH in 2023. He teaches at CUNY Hostos.