This week on Read it! Review it! Share it! I’ve whipped up a look at the short story. To be specific, a collection of them dealing with mortality and eternity!
Paths to Divinity is not a helter-skelter collection of short stories (rather popular these days), but rather a reviving of a hibernating medium. Some stories require such diverse voice and point of view as to strain against the classic story arc of the novel. Yet they are still stories deserving to be told and which we yearn to hear.
Thus enters Paths to Divinity, a story of nothing less than the veil between worlds. With each of the shorts in this collection Dicristofano toys with a different human perception of ultimate reality. With startling vividness Dicristofano delves into one world view after another, leading the reader down disturbingly provocative and terrifying bunny trails only to yank her from the threshold at the moment of transition and toss her back into the darkness yet again.
Fresh and cunning, Paths to Divinity leaves nary a stone unturned. A few of my favorites involved a tennis playing Grim Reaper, an evolving relationship between the Angel Uriel and the original serpent, and a terrifying twist of the demonic.
Amidst a sea of vampires and perky, pre-teen-on-angel romance, Paths to Divinity offers a hardy meal of venison and mead for the mind. Each course of the feast provides a new complexity of flavor begging the reader to either thrill or shiver under the implications. What does this life hold? What of the next? What of the in-between? And how will I respond when the moment finds me?
Horrible and beautiful at the same time, my only contention with the work is that more than once it kept me up at night. So what are you waiting for? Read it! Review it! Share it!