Sasha Graham's Ghost Stories by the Fire Book Release: Michael Cisco's PEST

Join Sasha Graham's "Ghost Stories by the Fire" Special Author Event: The NYC launch of PEST by Shirley Jackson award-nominated and Locus award-nominated author Michael Cisco.

Grab a craft cocktail and cozy up by the fire pit!

FREE RSVP HERE

Join Michael Cicso at the Barrow's Intense fire pit for a Q&A with Ghost Stories Host Sasha Graham and reading from his new book PEST.

PEST presents the bizarre events that lead a new, parallel life for a man named Chalo as a wild yak living in the Himalayas. Chalo the man is recruited by a latter day prophet named Grant to design and build a campus on Catalina Island, where initiates will be trained to receive a celestial visitor, the "Ancient Newborn." Chalo the yak reflects on his human past while the annual rut looms ominously nearer and nearer. The struggle to fund and construct the campus is complemented by the psychoactive changes of the yak breeding cycle, and the mating battles that Chalo will have to participate in. Both involve creating something that will outlast Chalo's individual life, and give it meaning. Both will also involve telluric forces, demons recruited by Grant to overcome sinister fiduciary magic, which cross-link the two halves of the story.

Michael Cisco is an American writer, Deleuzian academic and English professor currently living in New York City. He is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, winner of 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. Other fiction includes the short story collections Secret Hours and ANTISOCIETIES. He teaches at CUNY Hostos.