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...