Margins
Supernatural Minnesota book cover 1
Supernatural Minnesota book cover 2
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Supernatural Minnesota
Series · 4 books · 1984-1999

Books in series

The Businessman book cover
#1

The Businessman

A Tale of Terror

1984

Philanderer Bob Glandier thinks nothing of cheating on his wife, Giselle, but when his spouse takes off for Las Vegas, Bob is convinced that another man is involved and sets out to track her down
The M.D. book cover
#2

The M.D.

1989

This book is one of may faovrites. It has the standard wear and tear. It has been stored in my personal collection
The Priest book cover
#3

The Priest

1994

Since his work first began to appear in the early 1960s, Thomas Disch has proven himself, again and again, to be one of the most prodigiously talented novelist/playwright/poets of our time. In Newsweek he was saluted by Walter Clemons as "the most formidably gifted unfamous American writer." But in 1991, with the publication of The M.D., Disch's remarkably various gifts converged in a horror novel that propelled him into the mainstream even as it remade the genre in its own startling image. Now, in The Priest, Disch gives us an even more potent, darkly hypnotic, and fiendishly comic novel - a gothic romance like no other. At the center: Father Patrick Bryce, a Catholic priest with a present-day Minneapolis parish - and a pedophile past. He's spent time at a church-run retreat for priests of his persuasion and returned "rehabilitated": even better equipped to keep his vice active and hidden. Until the blackmail begins. It comes from three different sources (his own bishop being one), and each tops the next in imaginative proposals: Father Pat must head a militant (and probably illegal) anti-abortion campaign; Father Pat must apologize to each of his victims, face-to-face; Father Pat must read, and be ready to discuss, the work of a bizarre cult science fiction writer, and get the face of Satan tattooed on his chest. But the blackmailers and their demands are the least of Father Pat's problems. More dire is his increasingly incontrovertible sense that the nightmares in which he has been leading the life of a thirteenth-century bishop are not dreams at all. And that the Church, rife with corruption and scandal in both eras, is the only realistic sanctuary for him and his doppelganger, Bishop Silvanus de Roquefort, as they move - at once separately and together - through their own centuries-spanning maze of soul-killing horrors toward a distinctly hellish destiny. The astonishments, mayhem, and villainy they encounter along the way come brilliantly to life in an ee
The Sub book cover
#4

The Sub

1999

Following The Businessman, The M.D., and The Priest, Thomas M. Disch, heralded by Newsweek as "the most formidably gifted unfamous American writer," now continues his masterful series of horror-fantasy novels set in his own "supernatural Minnesota." At the very moment substitute teacher Diana Turney recovers memories of sexual abuse at the hands of her father, she finds herself weilding a potent brand of the Circe-like ability to turn people into their totemic animals. But once she unleashes these exhilarating matamorphoses on the citizens of the small hamlet of Leech Lake, she learns that she has not been given these powers so much as she has been given to them; that others, including her enemies, have similar gifts; that she has become the conduit of her ghastly father's evil energies, long dormant but now sprung to life; and that despite her unearthly gifts, escape this time might prove impossible. A work of fiendishly pleasurable plotting and prose, The Sub weaves a myriad number of strands—including New Age, Native American, and fundamentalist thinking—into a tapestry that is ethically devious, blackly comic, and increasingly horrifying.

Author

Thomas M. Disch
Thomas M. Disch
Author · 31 books

Poet and cynic, Thomas M. Disch brought to the sf of the New Wave a camp sensibility and a sardonicism that too much sf had lacked. His sf novels include Camp Concentration, with its colony of prisoners mutated into super-intelligence by the bacteria that will in due course kill them horribly, and On Wings of Song, in which many of the brightest and best have left their bodies for what may be genuine, or entirely illusory, astral flight and his hero has to survive until his lover comes back to him; both are stunningly original books and both are among sf's more accomplishedly bitter-sweet works. In recent years, Disch had turned to ironically moralized horror novels like The Businessman, The MD, The Priest and The Sub in which the nightmare of American suburbia is satirized through the terrible things that happen when the magical gives people the chance to do what they really really want. Perhaps Thomas M. Disch's best known work, though, is The Brave Little Toaster, a reworking of the Brothers Grimm's "Town Musicians of Bremen" featuring wornout domestic appliances—what was written as a satire on sentimentality became a successful children's animated musical. Thomas M. Disch committed suicide by gunshot on July 4, 2008.

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