The San Veneficio Canon [Hardcover]

Michael Cisco (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 10, 2004

Struck by lightening, resurrected, cut open, and stuffed full of arcane documents, the Divinity Student is sent to the desert city of San Veneficio to reconstruct the Lost Catalog of Unknown Words. He learns to pick the brains of corpses and gradually sacrifices his sanity on the altar of a dubious mission of espionage. Without ever understanding his own reasons, he moves toward destruction with steely determination. Eventually he find himself reduced to a walker between worlds - a creature neither of flesh nor spirit, stuffed with paper and preserved with formaldehyde - a zombie of his own devising. The line twixt clairvoyance and madness is thinner than a razor blade. In 1999, The Divinity Student captured the attention of fans of dark fantasy everywhere, eventually winning the International Horror Guild Award for best first novel. Now, The Divinity Student has been paired with its sequel, The Golem, for a must-have book - The San Veneficio Canon. Michael Cisco has created a city and a character that will live in the reader's imagination long after this book has been read...

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

San Veneficio, a place where illusion and reality, life and death, creation and decay all merge indistinguishably, provided the perfect backdrop for Cisco's debut Gothic fantasy, The Divinity Student (1999). The surreal city is back in all its charnel splendor in this double-decker compilation, which resurrects not only that novel but the deceased student himself, in a ghoulish sequel, The Golem. Exhumed by body snatchers in the opening chapters, the Divinity Studentâ€"an enigmatic searcher for meaning in his symbol-strewn worldâ€"patches together a form from corpse parts to serve as a vessel for his still smoldering spirit. The episodic plot tracks this "vibrantly rotten" monster's pursuit of Christine Dalman, a former fiance with an endless repertoire of magical subterfuges for eluding capture. Cisco's dreamlike narrative resists interpretations outside its own framework of strangeness. Rather, it moves fluidly from one hallucinatory set piece to the next, borne along by his evocative prose and a tide of weird imagery that suits the morbid setting.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 248 pages
• Publisher: Prime (March 10, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 189481567X
• ISBN-13: 978-1894815673
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #283,654 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cisco perfects his Otherworld, May 3, 2006

By 

Michael Koger "open minded listener" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The San Veneficio Canon (Hardcover)

I've already written a review for The Divinity Student, so the majority of this will focus on the second half of The San Veneficio Canon. In The Divinity Student, you are introduced to an enigmatic character whose insides are stuffed with papers and he lives off of formaldehyde. His task is to create a lexicon of lost words. In order to do this, he must slip into other realms of consciousness and (literally) probe the brains of the deceased. The cast of characters he encounters are wildly imaginative. Cisco really pulls you into the world of San Veneficio.

In The Golem (the second half of The San Veneficio Canon), the Divinity Student returns, but with a different purpose this time. Unable to go into the underworld himself, he creates a copy of himself, The Golem, and proceeds to chase after the woman he loves to marry her. Cisco creates a dazzling and overwhelming underworld. The pace of the novel, once the chase begins, is pretty fast paced.

Michael Cisco has been hailed by many authors as a Gothic revivalist of sorts. The worlds and characters he creates are simply unparalleled. If you're a fan of decadent literature, Thomas Ligotti, Jeff Vandermeer or Neil Gaiman, this book is for you.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Perfect for the poet, not for the storyteller, March 16, 2010

By 

flaviolius (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The San Veneficio Canon (Paperback)

The San Veneficio Canon was my first exposure to Michael Cisco, and I approached the book with some trepidation. I'm not a fan of Thomas Ligotti, but I adore early Mieville, Lovecraft, and Vandermeer, all of whom I read Cisco being compared to. I wasn't sure how I'd react.

The result? For me, a mixed bag. There's no doubt Cisco can write. According to the notes, he's got a PhD, so one assumes he's a smart guy. He's also got quite a talent for creating uniquely visceral imagery and captivating atmosphere. The problem for me was he didn't do enough with these images; the plots of these two related novellas did not live up to the heights (or depths, considering the ghoulish subject matter) of the stylish writing.

I will never forget some of the set pieces and literary power contained in this book, and how Cisco's writing made me feel, but I felt there was little to make these images more than just lurid mental pictures. What actually happens in The Divinity Student and The Golem becomes so buried by the heavy-handed writing, the events seemed little more than a loose, abbreviated structure upon which Cisco piles his considerable descriptive arsenal.

For example, I got the strong sense that San Veneficio itself was a strange and broken place indeed, but I could never put my finger on exactly why. San Veneficio seemed to be largely sensation with little grounding, making it difficult for me to accept it as a "real" place. Opposing examples would be Vandermeer's Ambergris or Barker's Imajica, with their richly imagined histories and mythologies.

If you're the type of reader who enjoys a mesmerizing barrage of incredibly poetic gothic language, change my ranking to five stars; you'll eat this up. If, like me, you prefer your dark fantasy to also feature an involving plot and relatable characters, look elsewhere. Mieville's Perdido Street Station, for starters.

If Cisco ever dreams up substance to match his style, the result will be a wonder indeed. For my taste, however, his Canon was half-amazing.