es, I know, I’ve done this with you guys before. Another weird/strange book that someone loaned me, this one a two-novella book titled The San Veneficio Canon. The first one, The Divinity Student, I completed. Then I washed my brain out with a nice samurai novel, just to ground myself. And if you think detailed historical fiction on ancient Japan is easy, you don’t know this book.

I’m not saying it was bad. Just… confusing. And disturbing.

Example? The story starts with a Divinity student getting hit by lightning, really fried. But what happens to him next is even stranger.

He is carried back to the church. He is cut open and his insides are scooped out. And then they stuff paper and manuscripts into him and sew him back up. Then he is reanimated.

His new mission is to go to the small desert town of San Veneficio, a weird little place where districts move about and cars are actually demons. There, he is to be a word-finder (wait for it) at a small firm. He is to (if I have this right) search for twelve lost words. Knowing these words will (again, if I have this right) allow him to define God, since knowing every word will allow us, by elimination, to define God. The problem is that those twelve words were known only to twelve men, all of whom have died.

But The Divinity Student (known only by this name) is taught a method. He can dunk the corpse in formaldehyde and sprinkle it onto his face and see the final memories and thoughts of the recently departed. And hence he can learn the words.

But as he works backwards through the corpses, each of them older than the last, he has to interact with the formaldehyde in more complete ways. First, to smell it. Then, to drink it. And this is capital reading while in a restaurant, a guy mixing up a dead-guy martini to ingest.

Really, I like all books, even this one. But as I often say, if there was a quiz on meaning and story, I’d probably flunk if. Still, all books read and put to bed leave us with an image of their stories. There is that.

>>>READ ONE OF MINE, AND GET MY STORY IMAGE. AVAILABLE HERE<<<