The Divinity Student

Rating:
Summary: Not quite as good on a re-read
Review: A re-read reveals the weakness of Cisco's relationships between characters, but it is still a wonderful piece of fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Verbal lyricism on a grand scale
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Verbal lyricism on a grand scale
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The divinity student makes textuality into living myth!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: This summer, San Veneficio is the place to be!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Incredible imagery; a meticulously crafted world of words.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: DIVINITY STUDENT RECEIVES STARRED REVIEW, PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY
Review: The following rave review appeared in Publisher's Weekly. The book has been published and is now available from Amazon.com.

*STARRED REVIEW* of The Divinity Student by Michael Cisco (Buzzcity Press)

Short but powerful, this neo-gothic novel, which is illustrated by Harry O. Morris, uses the crisp immediacy of the present tense to lead the reader on a hallucinatory journey from humanity to inhuman transcendence. After a miraculous recovery from near death, a young man known only as the Divinity Student is beset by strange dreams whose lingering effects further alienate him from his fellows. Abruptly, he is sent away from the chill, damp confines of the seminary to work as a word-finder in the vibrant, chaotic desert city of San Veneficio, scanning old texts to record any unknown words he may find. There he is pulled into a covert plot to reconstruct the lost Catalog of Unknown Words, a tome of "secret words, ghost-words and completely new," which could lead to an understanding of "the essential substance...the source of all renewal...the synthesis of all natural forces." Developing a weird black alchemy that he uses to literally absorb information from the brains of long-dead scholars, the Divinity Student steals away the remnants of their essence as he steals their corpses for his work. Swiftly, his desire to know deepens to obsession, pushing him further and further from sanity, risking everything to complete the Catalog and gain true understanding. Cisco wields words in sweeping, sensual waves, skillfully evoking multiple layers of image and metaphor. Though his novel is brief, it is a gem of literate dark fantasy, concisely illustrating the power, both light and dark, of words and meaning.

Rating:
Summary: A perfect construction of a dream.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Unlike anything you've read before
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Unlike anything you've read before
Review: 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!