The San Veneficio Canon (Hardcover)

~ Michael Cisco (Author)

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 Description

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...

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: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,030,634 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 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.