Acting on recommendations to read this book (from various people who's opinions I respect) I tracked down this book that, so far as I am aware, have never been published in the UK. I think it was worth it.Inside the cover there is a quotation from the author which says "I've always wanted to write something that would affect my readers like a spell, or a poison, or a drug, or hypnosis." That describes pretty well what the author was attempting to do with this book and I think he was broadly suce...

serial experiments lain for hollow boys with formaldehyde hearts

This is the most hallucinogenic novel I've read in a long time, perhaps ever, putting a strong emphasis on "weird" in "weird-fiction." If you can handle the lack of logic and linear plot, the language and imagery is fantastic, creating not just a brilliant atmosphere but an actual narrative.You know those nights that you have lengthy, complicated and disturbing dreams, and you woke up know that you've spent the last 6 hours inside a complex and involved story, but the second you try to tell some...

While still enmeshed in a kind of genre mechanics, this excels in the genuine invention of many of its particulars. I especially enjoy that the occult here lives in language itself -- lost words, secret dictionaries, a language that provides the only access to higher understanding. In these respects, it's a little like Delany's pulpy-philosophic linguistic sci-fi Babel-17. This was legitimately even weirder, with descriptive flights bordering on the waking dreams of automatic writing, but also f...

This book is short and to the point, which I'm definitely into, but in terms of "New Weird" (which this qualifies in a sense even though it's older), why this works is the way it builds toward the reveals. You meet the main character, and piece by piece drips out until you see the full picture as to what is happening. And it's wonderful and grotesque and so well put together that it was difficult for me not to really just love what was going on.Closer to a 4.5, as it definitely isn't perfect, bu...

Words and more words hit you in the face, boiling against your eyes like hedgehogs, not one at a time but great glancing gobbets of words, splattering and spattering, filling your nose and mouth, aching lines of sinuously strung adverbs, never one lonely adjective where yawning space can be found for an ostentatious prancing battalion of them, such a twinklingly clever stylistic choice for a book about word finders. And as for punctuation, don't bother using it for pacing, don't bother trying to...

I continue to read Cisco's books despite the fact that they have left me cold on numerous occasions (San Venefico Canon, The Tyrant, The Traitor). And for a couple reasons I come back for more when his next book is released. See, I remember reading about him before I actually read him and what the reviewers had to say about The Divinity Student with its surreal, dreamlike influence over the reader, really clinched it for me and I wanted to take a dip into that weirdo fantasy haziness that was de...

There's a lot of overused words I could use to describe this: dream-like, hallucinogenic, surreal, bizarro. I can compare this with other writers: Bruno Schulz, Thomas Ligotti, Eric Basso. There's others that come to mind but once you list so many you might as well just say that Cisco has his OWN style. And it's true, there's really nothing quite like this, you just have to read it for yourself.One thing to realize is that you're not going to understand everything that's going on here. Just let

A weird love affair with wordsThis book feels on some levels like a deep love affair with words and texts and language, although it’s hard to tell if the odd moments of fragmented sentences and full stops in odd places are deliberate or just a mistake in the edition I read. The sentences can be up to a paragraph long, and the “less is more” adage hasn’t bothered Cisco much, so if spare poetic prose is your thing, this may not be to your taste. I found it the book equivalent of watching an aquari...

Recommended but with caveats.So why "New Weird" and why Michael Cisco in the first place?I'm attracted to this type of fiction for many of the same reasons I'm drawn to certain kinds of out jazz, prog, avant classical, and heavy metal. At its best, this kind of material takes me to some unexplored corner of the human cosmos which I never knew existed, it can make me feel that rush of discovering something new, and perhaps most importantly, it challenges my notions of what is possible. Of course,...

A very aged man finds again the love he lost as a youth. As he moves to embrace her, he is suddenly transported to a lightless place. He can feel a cool, sterile wind blowing upon his face, a numbness in his limbs. Nearby are shrieks and mutterings, unseen yammering things surrounding him on all sides. After an infinite time he wakes beneath a tree, when a raindrop, a single one, drops into his right eye. When he understands that all he had just experienced was merely a dream, he walks into a r

Best . . . .. . opening scene .. . . . . amazing city . . . ... man who walks into town . . . .. . use of formaldehyde in fiction . . . ... EVAR.

Michael Cisco's "The Divinity Student" is a challenging read, in the best way possible. Even if the story is pretty straightforward, the many digressions and beautiful poetic style turn it into a maze, with many dead ends and false openings. I will not talk about the precise plot, because I will let the reader discover it, but it is a dark bildungsroman, set in a lo-fi fantasy world and city. Cisco has been compared with Kafka, Ligotti and Borges, but, to me, perhaps because I'm French, I found

For those of you that feel a need to put this in a slot, let us call this Gothic horror surrealism. Like all good surrealism the reader is going to want to assign meaning and connection to things that are meant to be meaningless and unconnected. On the other hand there is definitely somewhat of a linear plot here. In some places it is downright funny. The body snatching scenes are derivative of the usual cliches.What else can you say about a book where the Divinity Student is eviserated and stuf...

If only I could give this book six or seven stars. It is an amazing read, and beautifully weird. I don't know who the Divinity Student is any more now that I've finished the book than I did before I began reading about him, but that is the beauty of this book: knowing him is impossible. He is unreal; he is filled with words, not a heart or lungs or a gallbladder, as the following quotation makes clear:Quickly they bring him inside, lay him across two sawhorses and start cutting at him--they gut

This book was foggy, hallucinogenic, dream-like, bizarre, sometimes confusing, always fantastic. Fiction about words and language and their power and looking for new/lost/unknowable words and cars being demons and butcher shops and flying and confusion and clarity (mostly the lack thereof) and just fantastic imagery. I'm not good at writing coherent, useful reviews about even mundane sci-fi/fantasy/weird fiction, let alone this...but I think this book has changed me, for the better, for the weir...

You fall asleep and so enter a strange dream. In this dream, you are a scholar of faith, of divinity. You have died and your body becomes transformed: now made of the stuff of books, your insides stuffed like a bookcase. And so you are reborn, and sent on a secret mission: search for the secret words, in the secretive city of San Veneficio, words once discovered by certain deceased investigators. You will go to a job, and learn nothing; you will go to a church, and learn much. You will meet a gi...

Michael Cisco, The Divinity Student (Buzzcity Press, 1999)I had somehow gotten it in my head that The Divinity Student was a horror novel. I have no idea how that happened, for it is anything but. This is a fantasy, almost a steampunk novel, that put me in mind more than anything of K. J. Bishop or Ekaterina Sedia, but with the obsession with language more commonly found in Catherynne Valente or China Mieville. (And if you're a fan of any of the above and haven't discovered Michael Cisco yet, do...

I just finished this book and all I can say is WOW! From the brutal opening chapter to the beautiful ending and the whole hallucinatory ride in between, I was captivated. This is the only thing I have read from Cisco but I intend to devour his whole catalog now. This is one of the best books I personally have ever read. My mind has been thoroughly fucked. I felt like I was a kid again reading this book. I can understand if this isn't you're cup of tea but if you don't "understand" it you're not