Thomas M. Disch (1940–2008)

I was saving Tom Disch for the DeSantis administration, as I expect his books will match the mood then. But this book came to the top of a pile and, well...

One of his three "Supernatural Minnesota" novels, this 1984 title, while not Disch's best, rewards a read.

Giselle Glandier has problems - mainly, that she's dead, strangled by her husband Bob, the businessman of the title. Rather than going on to the afterlife, her spirit is confined, first to the cemetery, then to Bob's vicinity. She'd show more rather not haunt him, but seems to have no choice. There's also the matter of her spectral pregnancy with Bob's offspring, a demon baby who has a bad attitude toward everyone else, alive or dead.

Bob, the most relentlessly banal evil person you could imagine, is pleased to have gotten away with the murder (but the guy he bribed to supply an alibi is getting ideas). Bob is kind to Giselle's mother Joyce, in hopes of inheriting Joyce's house - hopes that are threatened when Giselle's brother Bing (who is gay, therefore of course estranged from the family) turns up.

Joyce dies early on (natural causes), and learns that heaven (or its lower levels anyway) is a lot like a shopping mall. Higher levels of the afterlife are reached by escalators; all very middle-class Midwestern USA.

Tom Disch (1940-2008) grew up gay in Minnesota and plainly had a great time settling some scores here. The (ghost of the) poet John Berryman is a major character, continually bleeding from the wounds from his suicide jump off a bridge and portrayed quite unsympathetically. Greedy, violent, stupid, trivial, obtuse - every character without exception is unsympathetic, a Disch specialty. The AIDS crisis would have been on the author's mind, but isn't mentioned. The bodies pile up quickly as the demon baby works to protect its father.

This novel lacks the razor-edged, bleak intelligence of Disch's best 1960s and 1970s books, but is worth picking up if you're feeling too much faith in your fellow humans. show less

This wasn't as good as I'd remembered it from previously reading it in 1990 - it was better! As a fan of the show, bringing my own associations to the text, my 5 ⭐ rating is undoubtedly objectively suspect, but that itself is in keeping with the book's themes of what we can and cannot trust, and the conditionality of reality.

Disch captured the smart, jousting dialogue just right, and created the layers of suspicion, second-guessing, cautious trust and resigned betrayals of the TV show more series.

His story is littered with the Shakespearean and classical references of the original, and the Bard's "Measure for Measure" forms both a plot element and a subversive meta-narrative on the role of the characters with the book, and of the writer and reader of the book. Whether the follow-up novels by two different authors will measure up to Disch's high standards remains for me to see.

Oh, and did Disch conceptualise motion-capture CGI in this 1969 novel? I think he did! show less

The Supernatural Minnesota books are just so damned good. The MD will remain one of the greatest literary horror novels of all time, but the other three are in no way to be sneezed at.

The Priest seems like an appropriate read at the moment. When it came out the various scandals that were rocking the Catholic Church were pretty bad, but few could have imagined the deluge to come. Well, Disch did, in a kind of murderous, tragic, apocalyptic way. Now there's a new pope and the taint of scandal show more has been irrevocably ingrained into the substance of the Church, and Disch's gothic vision of conservative Catholic values run amok in the modern world is pretty much a spot-on piece of savagely satirical entertainment.

In The Priest, a paedophile priest - an ephebophile, really - is blackmailed into, amongst other things, getting an enormous tattoo of Satan on his torso. Passing out while under the needle, he wakes up in the time and body of a medieval bishop in the throes of the orgy of torture and slaughter that was the Albigensian Crusade. Worse still, the medieval bishop wakes up in the priest's time and body. Hi-jinks ensue.

Oh, what a tangled, nasty tale. Disch's trenchant anti-catholcism is in full flight. With anyone else that might have led to something rather unsatisfying, but Disch's focus on the documented evils, while taking a side-swipe at a thinly disguised cult founded by a science fiction writer that's half Hubbard, half Streiber, and his merciless dissection of human vanity, means that even with the supernatural body and time jumping elements, this is a meditation on all-too-human and all-too-banal acts of evil. It's also a gut-wrenching exercise in mounting suspense, and the moment when the bishop is loosed on the pregnant girls trapped in the cells under the cathedral is agonising.

In the ongoing series of where-was-I-when-I-first-read-this, I borrowed The Priest from Cork City Library and read it on breaks and during lunches while working in Dunnes Stores in Douglas sometime in the mid-nineties. Hell of a book. show less

I started reading this book as research for the sci-fi class I am teaching this semester, but I kept reading it because Tom Disch's writing is delightful. Erudite and opinionated, Disch had me laughing and nodding at some of the oddest things -- his perspective on Scientology is sharp and brilliant, for example, and his attitude towards Star Wars is something I can relate to. I did not agree with everything he had to say -- he harshes on some classics and some favorites -- but even when I show more found myself disagreeing, I thought his points were fair. Some were even enlightening. For anyone interested not only in science fiction, but in the impact of SF on the rest of the world, this is worth your time. show less