The Great Lover (49 page)

Now it’s gone — the stars shine in the sky — a rioting mass of people are clawing at the ground where the sun disappeared.

Down below, the Deep Sun erupts in brilliant light like countless transparent fires. The Great Lover sings out and flies up into the air. Light cataracts into the chamber as the sun descends into the Deep Sun and joins with it in a cyclone of vaporized water that at once condenses into white clouds. The cement ceiling turns transparent blue, the clouds drift in it, the chamber is a meadow and the underworld is a landscape overflowing with light. The sky has gone underground.

About the Author

Michael Cisco is the author of
The Divinity Student
(Buzzcity Press; International Horror Writers Guild Award for best first novel of 1999),
The San Veneficio Canon
(Prime Books, 2004),
The Tyrant
(Prime Books, 2004), a contributor to
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases
(eds. Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts) and
Album Zutique
(ed. Jeff VanderMeer), and his work has appeared in
Leviathan III
and
Leviathan IV
(ed. Forrest Aguirre). His novel,
The Traitor
, is published by Prime (2007).
Secret Hours
, a collection of his Lovecraftian short stories, is published by Mythos Books (2007). In 2009-2010, his stories have appeared in the
Phantom
(“Mr. Wosslynne”),
Black Wings
(“Violence, Child of Trust”),
Lovecraft Unbound
(“Machines of Concrete Light and Dark”),
Cinnabar’s Gnosis: A Tribute to Gustav Meyrink
(“Modern Cities Exist Only to be Destroyed”), and
Last Drink Bird Head
anthologies. Forthcoming works include a story in
The Master in the Cafe Morphine: A Tribute to Mikhail Bulgakov
(“The Cadaver Is You”), an appearance in
The Weird
(Atlantic/Corvus), an omnibus edition of published work from Centipede Press,
The Wretch of the Sun
, from Ex Occidente Press, and
The Narrator
, from Civil Coping Mechanisms. His columns and the occasional review can be found at TheModernWord.com. He lives and teaches in New York City.

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For more information about these books and others, please visit:
http://chomupress.com/

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