The San Veneficio Canon - Softcover

Cisco, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1894815688 ISBN 13: 9781894815680

Publisher: Prime Books, 2005

Synopsis

Struck by lightning, 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...

About this title

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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Edition details

• Publisher: Prime Books
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1894815688
• ISBN 13: 9781894815680
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248