Nate D's Reviews > The Narrator

As much as I can tell from a few encounters its practitioners, the New Weird subset of forward-thinking genre fiction over the last 20 years or so seems situated between the polls of Lovecraft, surrealism, and the science fiction new wave, whose social themes and experimentation weren't always as readily picked up by the fantasy writing of the time. Throw in for good measure a bit of the alien causality of Roadside Picnic, and in Cisco's case postmodernism, and you may have a decent idea of whether this is the sort of thing you might read. Which is to say, a fantasy story with the unearthly immediacy of a dream and a deep concern for its own process of unfolding.

The plot concerns Low, whose studies as a narrator are interrupted, but not overlooked, by his sudden conscription into the military, where control of the dominant narrative may be of vital utility. The interests of the book lie in this self-interrogation, along with various interruptions and disturbances of narrative expectation, in attempting to capture the nightmarish arbitrariness of war, and in the utter strangeness of landscapes and cities over which the action unfolds, where much is suggested and little explained. At times I feel Cisco tips a little too far into necromantic particulars of that inescapable sub-theme of war, death (which is not constrained to this story but a major preoccupation of the only other Cisco I've read as well), but everything remains genuinely bizarre and original enough for it to stay clear of adolescent morbidity. There's really not much out there like it.