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 (born October 13, 1970) is a writer and teacher currently living in New York City. He is 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. His experimental novel UNLANGUAGE was nominated for Best Horror Novel by Locus in 2019. He has published in anthologies edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Ellen Datlow, among others, and his work has been translated into German, French, Spanish, and Italian. His scholarly monograph, Weird Fiction: A Genre Study, will be published in early 2022 by Palgrave Macmillan. He teaches at CUNY Hostos in New York City.