The Golem

by Michael Cisco, Paul Tremblay (Introduction)

The sequel to the International Horror Guild Award-winning novel that launched the career of a writer sometimes described as "the American Kafka." Struck by lightning, resurrected, cut open, and stuffed full of arcane documents, the Divinity Student constructs a golem replacement to pursue his love underground, with lyrical consequences. As Publishers Weekly wrote, "Cisco wields words in sweeping, sensual waves, skillfully evoking multiple layers of image and metaphor." Recommended for fans of Clive Barker, Thomas Ligotti, Gemma Files, Kafka, Leonora Carrington and other masters of weird fiction. With an introduction by Paul Tremblay.

Genres: Horror, Surreal, Fantasy

129 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

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

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Divinity Student returns, worse for wear but still ambitious, still yearning, in his quiet and sepulchral way. From the grave to the police station to the morgue to the laboratory he shall travel. He became Vampire in his last adventure; in this he has become Dr. Frankenstein. And so he shall create another him: The Golem. A mirror image, a twin, a part that represents the whole.



Pity the poor Golem, adrift from himself, of the Student but not the Student. Yet student still, always learning. He shall seek his lost love. But is it his love or the Student's? Is she lost... or is she hiding? Is she hiding... while hoping to be found? He shall travel underground to find her, traversing the anti-city, a place devoid of humanity, made of the stuff of dreams, and sighs, and groans. The Golem can bend reality, but what is "reality" in such a place? The Golem has the strength of many men, but what is "strength" in a world without mankind? He shall follow nonetheless, the fool, the tool, the sad and broken monster, yearning only for... what? Love? Redemption? But what could redeem a man made of pages and parts, books and bodies? The poor tattered puppet.



There shall be a meeting in the church, between Divinity and Golem and Woman, between Father and Son and Spirit. All the world will die yet all the dreams will come true. The universe expands, contracts, expands again. What is a mere Golem but the reflection of this universe? Perhaps both shall be born again, together. Ours is not to wonder why...

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This sequel to The Divinity Student is phantasmagoric, strange, misleading, sometimes confusing, often bafflingly weird, and follows in many ways the steps trod by its predecessor. The imagery here was great even when I sometimes lost the thread of what was actually going on. Don't rightly know that I understand what all happens, but that's kind of part of the package deal while reading a Cisco tale.

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Golem is the second volume of Michael Cisco’s two-book sequence, The San Veneficio Canon. Readers should certainly begin with The Divinity Student, the opening installment, before venturing into The Golem. Together, the two novels stand as masterworks of what is often called “Weird Fiction.”

In the opening paragraphs of the novel's Prologue, it becomes immediately clear that Cisco intends to unsettle the reader with a frightening, vertiginous blending of time and space. The Divinity Student is “speeding down a tunnel, hands thrown up in shock and dismay: it’s time again, and space again.”

We’re first presented with a kind of theatrical set: a white room, a mirror mounted on the inside of a door, milky light, snow drifting across thick carpets. Then everything fractures. “In the mirror there’s a collapsed figure, hanging its head, body petrifies into grey film . . . Then, miles beneath the white room, a dark doorless black room embedded in rock, lined with control consoles, hands and eyes fluttering like bats above illuminated displays.”

The Divinity Student feels an endless shift of equilibrium and his limbs stretch and stiffen in protest, but his body continues moving through increments of space. He falls, spinning. Is this an initiation rite, the Divinity Student reduced to a plaything of powerful, unnamed forces? Possibly. It all echoes his earlier rebirth as a being stuffed with random pages of text, a world in which control, embodiment, and knowledge are radically unstable.

Much of the work’s uniqueness lies in the author’s language—clinical and concise, yet combined with colorful, occasionally baroque descriptions, similes, and metaphors. And since I’m in complete agreement with Stephen King, who has stated more than once that reviewers often give away far too much, I’ll shift to spotlighting a number of features of Cisco's highly unique, off-the-wall, funky, flakey novel.

DEMONIC DARKNESS IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND
“No moon tonight; the desert exhales powdery ropes of darkness, as glacially indifferent and absent as the sky, with a positive substance of darkness.” This statement sets the tone for the entire novel: darkness is not the absence of light but an active, tangible force, a material substance that can be manipulated by a wizard, magician, alchemist—or golem. In the city of San Veneficio, concepts and abstractions, especially those of the nefarious variety, frequently become as concrete and real as a table or chair.

THE EYES OF GIANTS ARE UPON YOU ALL THE LIVELONG NIGHT
“Out in the desert giant monitor lizards, the size of horses, have emerged from their daytime hiding places to watch the city as they do every night, standing completely still, the city lights reflected in their enormous eyes.” Surely one of the most memorable and eerie aspects of San Veneficio: at night these giant green lizards, as large as Bentley sedans, encircle the city and keep watch as if they were a battalion of hired guards.

LAUREL AND HARDY MEET HIERONYMUS BOSCH
Two detectives, Pracke and Kipe, following their boss’s orders, drive out to a graveyard and exhume a coffin containing none other than the Divinity Student. What might have been a scene of ghastly resurrection instead veers into slapstick. The Divinity Student sits up, climbs out of his coffin, and marches off, only for the hapless detectives to catch him and haul him toward their car. “Under his coat he feels like a bag of sticks, his joints poking out in all directions, his flesh like wet cardboard. He coughs up a few more bits of paper with a retching sound and goes limp.”

UGLY, UGLY, UGLY CITY
“Of course there is a circus in San Veneficio—open warehouses with dirt floors and straw on the ground. The nightly audience sits hushed and excited in fleets of folding chairs on graduated risers, their backs to the open air.” And, naturally, we are treated to many details about San Veneficio, one of the ugliest cities ever imagined. And who occupies the center ring tonight? Teo. Readers will remember him as the Divinity Student’s assistant during the period when the bookish student was tasked with gathering corpses to extract their memories. Here, Teo dazzles the crowd as a knife-thrower, a skill that will prove valuable in his further adventures within the city.

LYRICAL INTERLUDE
“Christine Dalman, the Magician, moves to the center of the stage seeping autumn perfume, her serenely concentrated face suspended in tissues of faint red light, her hands float at the ends of rustling red silk sleeves, pale and bright against the carmine draperies behind her.” Meet the lovely lady taking a prominent place within Cisco's otherwise freakish, ugly, occult San Veneficio. She might not be the perfect lover for the Divinity Student, the Golem, or anyone else, but Christine certainly counterbalances all of the grotesquery and brutality laced through many of the novel's scenes.

DOUBLE YOUR PAIN, DOUBLE YOUR FUN
“Now the head, a perfect likeness, is lowered and joined to the body, the spinners sewing crazily, the surgical silk singing through the runners. The Divinity Student watches the body assemble itself dreamily, nodding back and forth on his stool. The head is attached, the body is complete." Cisco creates original twists and torques to the traditional doppelgänger tale.

Again, it can't be stressed enough, if you are a fan of weird fiction by writers like Jeff VanderMeer, China Miéville, Haruki Murakami, or Thomas Ligotti, you'll count Michael Cisco's San Veneficio Canon among your favorites.


American author and Deleuzian academic Michael Cisco, born 1970

[Feda · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book follows pretty much the same ans it's predecessor The Divinity Student. It's story is secondary and only serves the purpose of carrying the protagonists from one location to another where the auther tries to paint strange vivid pictures with his words. Unfortunately, I found these paintings overly complicated and difficult to imagine. It works from time to time and when it does it can be quite engaging but those moments are rare making the book a dificult read, somthing you push yourself to finish rather than looking forward to every new page.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still assembling my thoughts on this one. It was ALMOST as good as its predecessor, but didn't have quite the same full sense of nightmarish wonder. Came mighty close, though. And I did enjoy it very much. The parts of it I could fully comprehend, anyway. But hell...even the parts I couldn't really grok made for engaging and atmospheric reading.

[Andrea Derizio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mi è garbato di più “The Divinity Student”.

[Bbrown · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Golem is the sequel to Michael Cisco's most famous work The Divinity Student, or alternatively it's the second half of the work combining the two pieces titled The San Veneficio Canon. Since I read the pieces separately, however, I'm reviewing The Golem as its own short novel, but I want to be up front that the 13+ years between when I read The Divinity Student and when I read The Golem means that I likely missed many things. The Golem throws you back into the world established by The Divinity Student, and many characters from that first volume reappear, but there's no attempt to remind you who they are or what import they hold. You can piece together much of what's going on, though, and eventually it becomes clear that the story is very strange but not that complex.

It requires some fortitude on your part as a reader to get to that realization, however, as the prologue of The Golem is almost comically bizarre and difficult to grasp. This opening depicts a strange and visceral resurrection, a soul violently and sickeningly pulled down from what is perhaps some sort of heaven. Cisco has never been one to make it easy, but the discombobulation that these first few pages put you through means it’s definitely not where you should start in Cisco’s body of work. Just like other works by Cisco The Golem is dense and requires you to actively engage with the text to follow what’s going on, and even if you do so some things are mysteries that only get clarified later. Also like other works by Cisco, the prose isn’t for everyone, but I very much enjoy it:

As the sun sets, it reflects into her room, multiplying its gleams on the cut-glass beads that fringe the ceiling lamp, and lighting constellations of hanging glass ornaments, spangling the wallpaper with fading pumpkin-orange diamonds, but she remains asleep until it has set, and twilight turns everything to blue.

Eventually the main thrust of the story becomes clear, it’s an amalgam of a twisted Pinocchio tale and almost the reverse of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and well over half the book is taken up by a surreal chase through a bizarre version of the underworld. Despite its strangeness it’s somehow less of a nightmarish fever dream compared to The Divinity Student, with a more intelligible ending as well. It’s still a similar work, to be sure, and maybe they resonate with each other in meaningful ways. Since it’s been so long I couldn’t say.

One thing I’m left unsure about is the ending of The Golem, where the narrative gets more than a little meta. And by that I don’t just mean the dialogue between two characters where the titular Golem basically says “the story needed to be this way because that’s just how it had to be,” (read: because the author wanted it to). Instead I’m referring to the ending where the events of the book are referred to by one character as “a failed experiment.” Was this meant to communicate that Cisco considers this short novel a failure as well? I doubt it, since later on he paired it with his most widely-read work to make The San Veneficio Canon, but even if he does think so I disagree. While on balance it’s far from my favorite work by Cisco, it’s still distinctively his, with all the virtues and vices that come along with that.

My favorite work by Cisco remains The Tyrant, while perhaps the best piece to read to get a feel for him is The Divinity Student (even though most of his works aren’t as impressionistic) since that story gradually ramps up its weirdness in a more approachable way. I’m still happy to have read The Golem, though, and not just because of Cisco’s great writing. It was entertaining to return to San Veneficio and to read about these characters once again after so many years, it was like vaguely remembering a dream from long ago. 3/5.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cisco has oodles of talent, and while this shorter tale - the sequel to his famed and lauded 'The Divinity Student' - is significantly more accessible than many of his other works it still bears all the hallmarks of his imagination, creativity, and singular vision. I loved this book and basically stopped my day to finish it, unable to put it down. You must read the former to fully grasp the latter, and while reading Cisco can be a laborious struggle, it is almost always well worth the effort and focus. A brilliant story, equal to what precedes it, so much the same but also entirely different, just as I would have expected from Cisco.

[Curtis · Rating 3 out of 5]

LSD for people too scared to actually take LSD. It sucks you along on a trippy vision quest with no discernible plot and eventually spits you back out in reality with a bunch of weird stuff in your head but not much comprehension on its meaning.

[Joseph Carrabis · Rating 1 out of 5]

No.
It really says something about my response to a book when all I can muster is "No."
But that's all there is.
"No."

[Neal Carlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much less stylistically abstract than its predecessor, but plays out like an underworld Odyssey with some psychedelic action scenes. Would recommend if you enjoyed The Divinity Student.

[sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

WE ARE ALL PHANTOMS MANUFACTURED FROM WORDS

HOWEVER IT DOES NOt FOLLOW FROM THIS THAT WE ARE NOt REAL

[Leo · Rating 2 out of 5]

4/10

The entire book is just a big chase scene between the golem and the woman character. It’s 150 pages of descriptions of weird sceneries with zero character work.