The San Veneficio Canon

by Michael Cisco

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...

Genres: Fantasy, Horror, Fiction, Weird Fiction, Literature, Dark Academia, Supernatural

248 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2004

About the author

Michael Cisco is an American weird fiction writer, Deleuzian academic and a teacher, currently living in New York City. He is best known for his first novel, The Divinity Student, winner of the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999.

He is interested in confusion.

Reviews

[inciminci]

I'm giving up and dnf'ing at 50%, having finished The Divinity Student, the first part constituting The San Veneficio Canon.
Never thought a writing could be too weird for me, but this is. There's no sense nor explanation as to what happens, the writing is super dry and often a listing of what the divinity student does, and worst of all, a pet peeve of mine, it is written in present tense, which for some reason tires me.
I like some descriptions of the city, it certainly gave off an atmosphere.
Obviously I'm the minority, so I'm not rating this book, as maybe I just don't get it, and if I knew what the author is trying to do I could say, “Yes he achieved his goal“ or not, but I can't do that here.

[Stephanie Griffin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Words can’t do this justice. It’s like seeing the awe of infinity. Can you understand that?

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

See my reviews of the two novels within. It's Michael Cisco, so be prepared for a very unusual pair of tales (though by his standards, still pretty accessible!).

[Braden A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

At a loss for words after finishing "The Divinity Student". An incredible work about the power of words and language, told in an intense, surreal setting where nightmares and dreams live together, indistinguishable.
One of the most affecting things I've read in some, time, if not ever.

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cisco can most definitely write a scene. There are moments in this book (moments) that are now tattooed onto my brain. The book itself, narrative, characters, and location are already fading quickly from memory. Cisco is a poet, and a talented one, but I had difficulty enjoying the story. The Divinity Student was an uninteresting character who's motivations and psyche had no focus. While the story improved when it was told from another character's POV, these scenes were too short and sporadic.

I also found the allegorical allusions to writing and storytelling to be shallow and exhausting. I'm supremely tired of this trend to write about the wonders of story and the written word, which seems to come at the expense of good storytelling. Gaiman was able to accomplish both quite often in "Sandman" but he's been beating that theme to death since then, and with nowhere near the quality.

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just did reread the two Michael Cisco novels included in The San Veneficio Cannon - The Divinity Student and The Golem. Such incredibly bat-ass weird tales. I posted separate reviews for both novels; however, I feel so strongly about getting the word out on Michael Cisco, I am compelled to share my review of The Divinity Student here -

Following one particularly ghastly episode involving the hacking up of a stolen corpse from a church graveyard, the Divinity Student places a call from a public telephone to the occult leader orchestrating these macabre events, reporting unexpected difficulties with his latest assignment. The leader, a necromancer by the name of Fasvergil, barks back: “Itemize the damages. I’ll expect a report on this.”

This is velvet vintage Michael Cisco: not only are we given grisly, ghoulish Gothic horror (in this chapter, the Divinity Student must swallow the corpse’s liver), but Cisco peppers in the white-collar banality of filing expenses. What?! Since when does a sorcerer, wizard, or satanist need to itemize damages to complete an expense report? This shocking combination is what makes The Divinity Student so singular and unsettling.

Along with writers such as China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, Mark Z. Danielewski, Kelly Link, and Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco’s writing is frequently classified as “New Weird.” To emphasize just how weird literary fiction labeled “New Weird” can be, here are a number of examples from the first two chapters:

The Divinity Student enjoys a hike, but then it happens: he falls down dead and is taken to a low building where he is cut open from throat to waist, his innards ripped out, and he's stuffed with pages from many different random texts. His return to life as a textual being underscores the way literature can figuratively transform an individual, rewiring perceptions and cognition. Recall that Michael Cisco is a Deleuzian, and the cover art for Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is Man as the Palace of Industry by Fritz Kahn. We can envision this artwork with written texts in place of all the mechanized gizmos and gadgets. The Student’s body has been repurposed, changed into a vehicle “to set him to the task.” Ominous, ominous—there’s little doubt we’ve crossed into a world of surreal horror.



In the infirmary following his ordeal, the Divinity Student feels there is something mechanical about his hands, which fits neatly into a Deleuzian register: his hands are no longer exclusively his own; rather, they are components within a wider process. What process? The head of the seminary, a grim, menacing figure named Fasvergil, provides a sinister glimpse: he sends the Student off to the city on a yet-to-be-disclosed assignment. The Student offers no objection; he simply replies that he’ll do what he’s told, which signals a diabolical shift: he is less an autonomous individual than a desiring-machine calibrated to accord with institutional flows—precisely the process Deleuze and Guattari delineate.

As the Student travels across a desert via taxi to the city of San Venefico, he spots “the famous monitors, giant lizards over ten feet long, racing with alarming speed.” These immense lizards alert us that we are far removed from any trace of realism. In Cisco’s clear, matter-of-fact, clinical prose, the fantastic is simply a given element of land and city—a city named San Venefico (veneficium = sorcery, poison), a place that seems to sanctify danger and the occult.

Once in San Venefico, the Student sits on the clammy bank of a colossal fountain in the middle of a main plaza, with buildings for giants looming all around, knowing he has a letter directing him to obtain a position with a professional word-finder and await further instruction. “Unthinkingly, he reaches into another pocket and produces a small metal weight on a cord that Fasvergil had given him back at the Seminary. Sheltering himself from crowd and wind, he spits in his palm and swings the weight like a pendulum above his open hand.” The Student’s absorption in the metal weight has an eerie resemblance to a painting Deleuze and Guattari reference to undergird their philosophy of how people become part of desiring-machines, trapped in flows of energy and production: Boy with Machine by Richard Lindner. And the fact that Fasvergil gave him this object indicates it isn’t for innocent play but a tool to bind the Student to authority.



The Student wends his steps to the office where he’ll be working as the new word-finder. In the way Cisco describes the office itself and the office workers, we have the distinct impression the Student has walked into a nightmare—cold, mechanical, and icily depersonalized. He takes his place at a desk in an odd-shaped room with three other clerks and is immediately on the receiving end of hostility, especially from one clerk who looks like a grown-up version of Lindner’s Boy with Machine. Again, we think of Deleuze and Guattari: a world drained of even a trace of warmth, human bodies and human relations reduced to machine processes.

As indicated above, what I’ve detailed is taken from just the first two chapters. Cisco’s novel runs to eighteen chapters, each one shifting, sliding, and building on the surreal, absurd, grotesque, revolting, and horrific. Added to this, the pages are laced with dream logic from the art of Salvador Dalí and the prose of Guillaume Apollinaire, hallucinations that call to mind Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, the breathtaking visions in Hermann Hesse’s Magic Theater, and violence — abundant violence — as the fictional counterpart to the paintings of Francis Bacon. How will it all end after the Student takes up residence in a meat freezer, experiences extreme paranoia, encounters wizards, and even an acrobatic muse? That is for Michael Cisco to tell.

Michael Cisco is now on my list of favorite authors. I plan to read and review The Golem, The Tyrant, The Traitor, Secret Hours (a collection of his short stories), and his mammoth masterpiece, Animal Money. The Divinity Student will open your imagination in the uncanniest ways. Your mind may never be the same again.


American author and Deleuzian academic Michael Cisco, born 1970

[Ty · Rating 5 out of 5]

A writer should not only know how to write well, they also need to know how to create a scene. Everything in this book is deviously well put together.

[Walter Polashenski · Rating 4 out of 5]

I give four stars for the language and the mood. Four the characters who were interesting although very opaque. But I wish for more story. Perhaps there are no reasons for what happens, perhaps all is random and beyond control. But I feel like I still can’t put my finger on what happened. And that feels like a failure.

[Trevor · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF. Divinity Student was alright, but it fell apart pretty quickly after that and I gave up about 80% through. Didn't care about the characters and it stopped making sense.

[Lane · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this, and I really love me some surrealist, grotesque imagery, but this book (or these books I guess, this being a collection of The Divinity Student and The Golem) made me realize that without a grounded sense of place, character motivations, or at least the glimmer of an explanation for any weirdness that may pop up, too much surrealist grotesque imagery can feel pretty tedious.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cisco's imagery ... it's almost too much for me to handle because it's so intense. It makes his prose slippery and I find myself reading passages two or three times to ensure that I can imagine what's going on (as opposed to understanding). I still don't know what this New Weird means - waiting patiently for the NW anthology for that enlightenment - but this book and author have something special going on.

[Meg · Rating 1 out of 5]

Despite his good intentions and occasional good prose, Michael Cisco fails to make much sense of his scenarios, rendering the book almost unreadable.

[Jonathan Wood · Rating 3 out of 5]

LOVED The Divinity Student to bits. Utterly weird. Utterly compelling. Didn't make it through The Golem. Not entirely sure why.