Customer Reviews

The Divinity Student

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If Michael Cisco's _The Divinity Student_ is remembered for one thing it will be for the magnificent way that Cisco strings his words together. As a previous reviewer has already noted, this book is a feast for devotees of the written word.

I cannot claim to have fully understood every page of this novel. It is not an easy read. It forces you to read each and every paragraph carefully and even then you need to apply yourself to understand the words on the page.

The Divinity Student is thrown out of the seminary after he is apparently struck dead by lightning. He is brought back to life by a mysterious group of people who gut his corpse and stuff him full of pages from a mysterious book. He is put to work as a word-finder. He soon learns that there is a book full of lost and possibly forbidden words; 'the Catalog'. He is approached by a representative of an underground organization who tells him that he, The Divinity Student, has been chosen to do something or other with the Catalog.

The Divinity Student soon finds that the Catalog has been destroyed. He learns of 12 deceased word-finders who were the authors of the Catalog. He, along with his butcher, finds the corpses, drains them of their essence and begins recreating the Catalog.

_The Divinity Student_ is a dense story, but it is very, very fascinating. Cisco changes scenes often which makes it difficult to follow the story. His writing style is gorgeous. It makes this story worth reading for the subtle nuances of the English language alone. As I said, I did not fully understand this story. I suspect it will benefit from a re-reading or two. I do not understand the significance of the cats in the street. I am perplexed by the apparently sentient cars. Many passages in the book are made up of dream sequences, which makes it difficult to determine what is real and what is not.

I would love to read a definitive description of this book, to know what it's all about. Until I find one, I will remember this book as a masterpiece of literary wordplay. Most of this book appears to be written in the present tense, which is strikingly different from the norm. I look forward to finding more of Michael Cisco's writings. Check this book out. It's different. It's neat. It's good. Recommended.

There is a short author's note at the end of "The Divinity Student" where Michael Cisco describes his notion that the act of reading induces a trance-like state, and how his ambition was to produce a work that made one feel as if the words were being dreamt rather than read.

He succeeded. Brilliantly.

This work stands as a bizarre exploration of the surreal and macabre. The story, set in a time and place which are indeterminate, revolves around a divinity student who has been reanimated from death. He is given a mission to move to an old city and take up work as a "wordfinder". That is to say, one who finds and records words which exist but are not official components of language. They are unconsciously written and spoken but never recognized or defined. This develops into a deeper quest to recover the contents of the Book of Words, which had contained the diction of a powerful, pure, and divine language but has since been destroyed. To do this, he must employ strange, mystical techniques on the decomposing corpses of the book's original compilers and thus retrieve this knowledge. As more information is acquired, the divinity student drifts farther and farther from our world into supernaturalism, black magic, and ghoulish power.

The narrative proceeds with an entirely unique cadence as there is a disquietingly smooth flow from one bizarre event to another. The pace and candor, which are sleepy and strangely matter-of-fact, sharply contrast the content, which is immensely dark and bloated with odd, frightening events and with starkly hallucinatory sequences. The reader feels as if they are drifting effortlessly and naturally from one deranged moment to the next, much as they would in a dream. Imagine a lake with a floor made from a giant kaleidoscope that is backlit with powerful lamps and has a black octopus living in the center; or perhaps a priest with eyes painted over his closed eyelids who can induce visions by blowing formaldehyde onto your face.

The details are blurry and vague at best, and much of the plot must extrapolated from the weird collection of information presented. The characters are strange and mostly two dimensional, but this level of depiction, I believe, is necessary to support the foggy, half-real atmosphere of the writing. The prose is, at times, absolutely gorgeous.

I do not recommend this book to anyone interested in a gripping narrative full of strong, memorable characters. I do not recommend this book to anyone who seeks explanation and closure from a story. I do not recommend this book to anyone with a weak stomach.

I do recommend this to someone who is willing to experiment with this odd form of escapism and experience the unique sensation of dreaming through the pages. The images that Cisco evokes are bizarre, but also fascinating in their frightening and psychedelic un-wordliness.

And then, at some point, the book ends and you simply wake up.

Wow. I was genuinely blown away by this little novel. I have heard Cisco compared to Ligotti (there is even a Ligotti blurb on the back), but his work is entirely unique, a bizarre marriage of disturbing surrealism and dark fantasy rendered in a highly original prose style. The book is worth reading for the prose alone, which replicates the effects of a dream, at times blurry and indiscriminate and sharpening to crystalline detail at other moments. The imagery is some of the most simultaeneously beautiful and nightmarish that I have ever experienced save in the work of Kafka, Schulz or Ligotti. The plot moves with a raw, pulsating power, and the book induces bizarrre emotions in the reader which have their only corollary in dreams (or nightmares). The last chapter is one of the most bleak and moving pieces of prose that I have encountered in weird fiction. Simply put, if you are a lover of surrealism or dark fantasy, YOU NEED TO READ THIS BOOK.
NOTE: This book is being reprinted in The San Veneficio Canon, to be published by Night Shade Press. The San Veneficio Canon will also include the sequel to The Divinity student.

Of THE DIVINITY STUDENT acclaimed master of the horror tale, Thomas Ligotti, has said, "Festival of unrealities, an entrancing body of hallucinations mutilated with surgical precision by a masterful literary maniac." For my money, truer words have rarely been spoken! The _singular_ voice of this gifted wordsmith delivers page turning, titillating romps that will have both readers and critics alike singing his praises for a long time to come. In an era when mountains of the same-old clutter the shelves of the horror section, few novels can be called a breath of fresh air, but Cisco's ingenious tale of the uncanny stands as a radiant beacon to those of us who have long enjoyed the dark wonders of the weird tale.

Michael Cisco, The Divinity Student (Buzzcity Press, 1999)

I had somehow gotten it in my head that The Divinity Student was a horror novel. I have no idea how that happened, for it is anything but. This is a fantasy, almost a steampunk novel, that put me in mind more than anything of K. J. Bishop or Ekaterina Sedia, but with the obsession with language more commonly found in Catherynne Valente or China Mieville. (And if you're a fan of any of the above and haven't discovered Michael Cisco yet, do so at your earliest opportunity.) It is beautiful, fascinating, thought-provoking.

As we open, the nameless Divinity Student of the title is struck by lightning and killed, but we soon see that this is some sort of common (or at least understood) ritual in this world; the body is returned to the seminary, eviscerated, filled with pages ripped from sacred books, and plunged into water. (I now want to be buried like this.) He then returns to consciousness and is given an assignment by Fasvergil, the head of the seminary; he is to go to San Veneficio, a nearby city, and get work as a word-finder while he waits for further instructions. When he gets them, that's truly amazing (and it's there the plot really kicks off), but just think about the idea of a world where you can go to a city and find work as a word-finder.

There are so many wonderful things to say about this book that I'm not even sure where to begin. There are some I can't talk about, because we'd be getting far into spoiler territory, but the writing is just phenomenal; Michael Cisco has a love affair with the language, and it shows. The downside to that is that typographical and proofreading errors made by the press tend to come through more in books like this (and it didn't help that this was the second book in a week that used the odd, but somehow appropriate, phrase "door jam"; as it is spelled right in other places in the book, I'm giving Cisco the benefit of the doubt and blaming the press), but that's not something for which I can blame the author. And the plot here is one of the most original, and pleasurable, I've come across in years.

The book is not perfect, though if you're going to err, better to do it this way than the other; if anything, it's shorter than it should be. There are a few chapters that begged to be further fleshed out ("The Final Interview", especially, could have been twice as long as it is). Still, there's so much about this book to love that you can't go wrong. This is by far one of the best books I've read this year, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Find it and read it as soon as you possibly can. **** ½

Brilliant and dark, just how I love it. This book strung together words in ways that I have never laid eyes on before or since. Interesting story and GREAT imagery. I love the structure and combination of words just as much as the tale they are weaving.

Michael Cisco has in The Divinity Student performed the feat declared impossible by the only other member of his sub-sub-genre, Thomas Ligotti: he has wrought a nightmare vignette of depressive elation, nihilistic revelation, in novel (okay, novella) length. It is a weird journey to be compared only with the eerie and stunning impact of reading Ligotti's own Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I wish Cisco's new fans good hunting as they now go in search, as they must, to find his several short stories, including "The Reliquaries," "Translation," "He Will Be there," "For No Eyes," "The Water Nymphs," "Firebrands of Terror," and others. His Divinity Student is like Ligotti's Vastarien, the book that is not about a thing, but is that thing.

The Divinity Student lives in a miasma of incredible images, a world of moments and sensations that are described with a truly amazing marriage of meticulous detail and subtle understatement. The plot is dark and intriguing, as the Divinity Student exposes the true purpose and power of the quest on which he is sent, and as that quest slowly overcomes him with a life of its own; but the enjoyment in reading this book comes from the author's exquisite description of each individual moment. A must-read for anyone who takes joy in well-crafted wordsmithing.

Although not entirely blown away by Cisco's first work, I am appreciative of his project as an author; combining literary traditions and siting influences including Tolkien and Lovecraft, two of the 20th-century's greatest "genre" writers, Cisco can count me among his target audience. His ultra-bizarre, seductive, psychedelic and trance-inducing prose lends a certain conviction to his otherworldly backdrop and story. Most of the action and story elements occur between the lines, and what the reader's imagination creates from these suggestions is the magic and power that make this work remarkable. Recommended for all those who constantly wonder, "How real is the 'real world'?"

What Michael Cisco did with The Divinity Student is he created a name for himself in the dark fantasy realm. This novel chronicles the journey of a man who is simply known as The Divinity Student. In the first few chapters of the book, you can already tell that this is going to be an interesting read. The Divinity Student is made up of book pages instead of body parts. His job is a word finder. He begins working in the city of San Veneficio and meets a lovely cast of characters (a mystical clown, something that reminds me of a chesire cat called an "oro" and many others). He soon realizes his task is to disinter the 12 bodies of the greatest word finders. He must look into their memories and write down every word they knew.

Stunning, surreal, undefiable--Michael Cisco has written an amazing piece of literary work here. Fans of Thomas Ligotti and Simon Logan should definitely check this out!