This book is small but not slight, a dense novella packed with so many threads and concepts and ideas and images. The text itself, at some points, becomes heavy, thick, like a bunch of tangled words twisting towards an abyssal center, much like a black brane itself.

Mercifully short. Short enough to let you ponder over everything and each piece. Short enough to let it sink in, and wallow around inside of you. The words twisting and tangling, again, black hole center, slowly opening up inside of you. As you continue on, each section, each sentence, brick by brick, word by word, stone by stone, bird by bird. Thread tangled, words tangled, meaning tangled, unwound.

Some would say some influence of Kafka here, some Chambers there with a Yellow Sign, and some Machen here with Great God Pannish concepts, and maybe some Ligotti and more Ligotti and Evenson, and, and, and…

And they tangle, these things, they tangle about. They subvert, subterfuge, are misdirections.

To which direction the tangle goes? Like undertow flows, brings you into the black star heart. Search for the holes in the text is searching for the holes in thoughts. Search for the holes, study the holes. The meaning of holes is the hole in meaning. No meaning no void, holes are not the absence, but instead the thing presence walks through, conjures into being.

Like black is not the absence of color, but instead is all colors tangled up. White noise districts disturbs here and there, they are about the absences. They are echoes and empty spaces.

This is the kind of book you read and think about. You are tangled up with it and entangled with it. Your thought particles made of holes and the holes speaking to you. I wanted to talk about the experience of reading this book.

Not a review of the book. Not a synopsis of the book, but instead what it feels like to read it.

Like climbing into a hole. But the hole is made of all this stuff knotted together. Not an empty hole, but instead a hole of text, a hole of words. All the missing words cancelled elsewhere. There is a sense of logic falling, of words failing. The pain of the narrator is not our pain, but his entanglement is, and will be.

You don’t walk away from this book. It sticks with you, and stays with you, a fingerprint on your thoughts.

Excuse me now. I must go read some more books by Cisco. I must go and read some more of the books, yes. Do I recommend this book? Do I give it thumbs up or thumbs down? Five stars four stars or empty stars, voids of stars without color filling them up? An anti-rating for a playful novel about the voice of the void?

That doesn’t matter. What matters is the unwinding experience of the book. The entangled way it crawls into your brain.

You will dream about holes, then, and realize a part of your mind has a hole in it now, a hole in the shape of this book, all tangled, whispering unwords, cancelled words. Is the hole thinking to you, speaking to you, meaning to you?
It does for me. It does.

*originally I typed this title half awake on a typewriter and wrote this post/essay/review thing. When I looked at it later, I’d written the word Unwinding backwards. Not on purpose mind you, it took a moment to see what I did. It just looked like gibberish. What did I mean by Gnidniwnu? Then I typed it into a word document, and saw what it was. Strange. I have dyslexia, but never just wrote backwards without meaning.

Somehow, I blame this on the book. On the echoes still living inside of me.