Paths to Divinity by Joseph DiCristofano

The very first story might have actually put me off reading the collection in its entirety, if I hadn't picked up this book as part of a challenge. I did like that there was a variety of different genres, even if all of the stories seemed to have a recurring theme of death throughout. Short story collections tend to garner a mixture of different emotions when I read them. My only contention with the work is that more than once it kept me up at night. Horrible and beautiful at the same time, Paths to Divinity's means and methods matches its contents perfectly. What does this life hold? What of the next? What of the in-between? And how will I respond when the moment finds me? Each course of the feast provides a new complexity of flavor begging the reader to either thrill or shiver under the implications. 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.Īmidst 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.

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.įresh and cunning, Paths to Divinity leaves nary a stone unturned. With each of the shorts in this collection Dicristofano toys with a different human perception of ultimate reality. Thus enters Paths to Divinity, a story of nothing less than the veil between worlds. Yet they are still stories deserving to be told and which we yearn to hear.

Some stories require such diverse voice and point of view as to strain against the classic story arc of the novel. Paths to Divinity is not a helter-skelter collection of short stories (rather popular these days), but rather a reviving of a hibernating medium.

Paths to Divinity by Joseph DiCristofano