The Divinity Student returns, worse for wear but still ambitious, still yearning, in his quiet and sepulchral way. From the grave to the po
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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...
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: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 girl and a butcher: together you will make your own special place, together you will find the bodies of those word surveyors and dig them up, break them free; you will distill and then drink their secret essence. You will find such knowledge... empowering. Your mind expands. You become transformed again, your powers increase as your connection to life decreases. Your mission is inconsequential now, forgotten; your former masters hold no sway. You are the Divinity Student: you will always study the empyrean domain above, unearthing those bodies below, prying out their secrets. You will die and live again. What does it all mean? you wonder. What do these secrets amount to, how can the ineffable, the divine, be contained within mere words? There is no need to wonder on such things, you realize. This is all merely a dream. Or maybe a nightmare? Perhaps you have become the nightmare.
and who does this so-called "traitor" yearn to betray? he is Judas to that quicksand of lumpish bodies, those cities of prison gray and sewer brown, tand who does this so-called "traitor" yearn to betray? he is Judas to that quicksand of lumpish bodies, those cities of prison gray and sewer brown, this world of chittering mindless insects: he seeks to betray humanity itself. the traitor would see this race of fools fall, their cities flooded and their works in flames, their minds set free unto oblivion.
the story is recounted by Nophtha, a lonely fellow much abused by the world seeking to in turn abuse that world, an apostate, a man with strange powers: he is an eater of spirits. the novel was written by Cisco, the blood of Ligotti and Dostoyevsky pulsing in his veins: pedantic, misanthropic, malevolent, darkly witty; the imagery obscure, the narrative ambiguous, the theme cutting sharp, stabbing the reader again and again with its points.
the text was at first difficult to enter. the prose impresses, but does not ingratiate. nor do his characters. they challenge. but suddenly I found my way in via one phrase:
I've never been all that bored because I am either not paying attention or paying complete attention.
ah! I thought. such a trifling comment, but still: Nophtha is me and I am Nophtha! rather amusing to suddenly have empathy for a character with no empathy in him.
the world Nophtha inhabits is not our own. (view spoiler)[or is it? (hide spoiler)] "Sin Eater" is a profession, for example, one that is particularly handy in a world full of spirits mooning about. there also exists the rare "Soul Burner" and they are feared pariahs; one such being becomes a mountain that issues a clarion call to our antihero's black hole of a heart. Nophtha has other powers including, ironically, the power to heal. in one particularly striking scene, something called a "minister" rips apart a door with its paws. the Soul Burner featured in this book, the delirious yet sneaky Wite, can pulp and incinerate others with a gesture; this leads to a couple massacres, depicted in an almost offhand manner. there is a master race of sorts, the Alak, who function as a near-parody of what the U.S.A. often believes itself to be, benevolently controlling countries and respecting their cultural traditions and mournfully upholding human rights; I'm not sure if the Alak are even supposed to be human. I'm not sure anyone is truly "human" in The Traitor.
a word must be said about the master class in writing that Cisco gives in the last third of this novel. as Nophtha's plans escalate and as he recounts those plans in his Alak cell many years later, increasingly excited and nastily triumphant, the prose itself quickens, taking on a feverish quality in its hallucinatory stream of consciousness and in its digressions, personal asides, lack of logic, and especially in its hypnotic use of repetition. by the end, I was spellbound by noxious Nophtha and his happy tale of horror....more
sorry, seekers of swift and forgettable pleasures (and I include myself in that number): this one is for advanced readers only... if you aren't able tsorry, seekers of swift and forgettable pleasures (and I include myself in that number): this one is for advanced readers only... if you aren't able to hang with that, time to move on. you may not like what you see here. or hey, maybe you will.
if you have to put a label on them, the stories in this collection would I suppose be considered Tales of Horror. they are not classic ghost stories nor are they visceral modern narratives either - some of these stories barely even have narratives. they come, if they come from anywhere, more from the tradition of 'Weird Fiction' - Blackwood, Bierce, et al. even that is an unsuccessful label. I would put this author next to Aickman and Ligotti: he has Ligotti's ability to conjure up physical landscapes of blight and decay and bizarre otherworldliness, but his focus is more on the internal, much like Aickman. and yet he is not particularly focused on the psychological, unlike Aickman. really, he is unique. his stories are often about a state of mind. spiritual transformation. mental degradation. crazed emotional highs and lows. metaphorical landscapes. terrible forms of transcendence. intellectual terrors. chthonic excavations. although the author makes good use of the Lovecraft mythos and ideas drawn from Machen and Chambers, this collection is about as far away from straightforward horror as the brilliant film Brazil is from traditional science fiction. but still, the frisson created in the reader is decidedly horrific more than anything else. profoundly ambiguous and cerebral horror. after finishing a story, my reaction was usually What the hell did I just read?
the man is a genius with the words. "literary writer" is a vaguely objectionable phrase to use when describing a genre writer because it condescendingly implies that most genre writers are tradesmen rather than artists. but I suppose the shoe fits in this case. he is highly literary and highly challenging, demonstrating complete ease in using modernist and postmodern techniques whenever he pleases and almost always refusing to allow easy interpretation of his methods and meanings. Cisco does believe in the genre - it is clear he's no dilettante - but he works against the genre as well. he toys with it. despite the rigorously intellectual take on horror, he's also quite playful - there is so much that is mordantly, perversely funny. so Cisco is the whole package: literary skills and mastery of the genre and gleeful gamesmanship, all in one. sentence by sentence, page by page, story by story... I was extremely impressed, again and again.
all that said, this collection is a hard one to recommend. I guess see the first paragraph of this review. Secret Hours is not for everyone. but it is definitely for me!
here are some of my favorite stories, in roughly ascending order:
What He Chanced to Mould in Play visits a sodden Coney Island where Azathoth & Nyarlathotep meet-cute. sorta.
Herbert West: Reincarnated has our favorite Re-Animator discovering a new frontier: time itself! oh, Dr. West, you bad boy you - always with the tricks up your sleeve. the story is narrated by a re-animated corpse, of course.
Dr. Bondi's Methods details how Dr. Bondi of The Moral Institute carries out his patriotic duty of Keeping His Country Satanic by trying to figure out the mystery of what makes a "good person". it's a tough job, requiring many subjects.
Machines of Concrete, Light and Dark's protagonist takes a day trip with an intriguing, devouring lady friend to a place beneath his skin. Co-optation. Use. Loss. "This is necessary."
City of God is a wonderfully sardonic and sinister story of the city Dusktemper, divided by the concepts of Life and Death. divided but connected, existing side by side. our young hero: a novice necrophore enrolled in the Embalmer's College.
Water Nymphs... submerge, emerge, submerge again. rinse & repeat. drain yourself out of you. there is no you at all...
Translation is set in the far-future. or another dimension. or our own, transformed. our ambitious duo of translators find a way to summon their new employer. he has a very special story to tell them. I am You and You are Me and We are All Together!
The Depradations of Mur are not "depradations" per se. they are more like invitations. invitations to a personal-cosmic memory palace where the narrator is most at home. a palace of the mind in which the mind in question exults in its slow disintegration as it becomes one with a malevolent memory decay transform rot ruin unlife lkjsfd xyxyxy jklsf vines tendrils deadmind father,ohfather youmnemosynx'uu[]
He Will Be There: Hey Brother! Let's do something! Let's go somewhere, let's make a new friend, let's force a new friend into our car. Let's show our new friend something. "Knock Knock" "Who's There?" "King In Yellow!" "King in Yellow Who?" "King in Yellow You!"
and my favorite, the brilliant novella The Dream of the Ucasunis. this is the sole traditional tale of horror and suspense in Secret Hours. I'm reminded of Robert Aickman's "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" - an equally brilliant and atypical story from that author, one that illustrated his ability to concoct a fairly straightforward narrative, if he so chose. he chose not to, 99% of the time. and so it is with Cisco and this story. I feel guilty about this being my favorite as it is so different, almost mainstream. but love's arrow flies where it will! and I fell in love with this haunting, morbid, and appalling story of a village girl employed by a beautiful and aloof family. there are things implied in this story that are so repellent, so monstrous, I really didn't even know what to make of them. my mind blanched. and yet the creeping horror, the awful grotesquerie, the sheer nastiness... it all comes wrapped up in page after page of luscious, evocative prose in an eerie story that is subtle, sensual, a model of elegant craftsmanship ... swoon. I guess. I'm either swooning or passing out horrified, I dunno. Jesus Fuck!
to sum up: this collection really sucked me in. but where did I go to exactly?
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