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Thomas M. Disch's Supernatural Minnesota series
|  The Businessman
A Tale of Terror
Thomas M. Disch
Foreword by John Crowley
The wicked first book in Thomas M. Disch's Supernatural Minnesota series
The Businessman presents the sinister tale of Bob Glandier, a morally repulsive Twin Cities executive who murders his estranged wife and attempts to go back to business as usual, until she returns to set about arranging his divine retribution, undertaking an elaborate and wickedly amusing haunting of her husband. There is justice in the afterlife after all -- at least in Minnesota.
"An entertaining nightmare out of Thomas Berger and Stephen King."
-Time
"Equal measures of terror and whimsy, spookery and spoof . . . Disch puts his storytelling skills squarely at the service of a highly charged moral vision, without ever reneging on his promise to dazzle and entertain us."
-Newsweek
University of Minnesota Press | 320 pages | 2010
ISBN 978-0-8166-7208-0 | paper | $16.95
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 The M.D.
A Horror Story
Thomas M. Disch
Foreword by John Clute
A chilling allegory for the field of modern medicine
Exploring questions of guilt and responsibility, The M.D. is a satisfying mix of dark humor, biting social commentary, and terrifying horror. Given the power to heal or to harm by the Roman god Mercury through a magical staff, the caduceus, young Billy Michaels embarks on a lifelong journey of inflicting good and evil on those who cross his path. From paralyzing his brother and mutilating schoolmates to wreaking a nationwide plague and running for-profit concentration camps for the sick, Michaels's powers spin quickly out of control.
"The M.D. is simply one of the best novels of horror-fantasy I've ever read. Thomas M. Disch has been writing wonderful tales of imagination for years now-stories that sometimes amuse, sometimes sting, sometimes horrify, and sometimes manage to do all three at the same time-but The M.D. is surely his magnum opus."
-Stephen King
University of Minnesota Press | 424 pages | 2010
ISBN 978-0-8166-7209-7 | paper | $16.95
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 The Priest
A Gothic Romance
Thomas M. Disch
Foreword by Gregory Feeley
The third -- and most controversial -- installment in Thomas M. Disch's
Supernatural Minnesota series
At the center of Thomas M. Disch's novel The Priest is Father Patrick Bryce, a Catholic priest with a present-day Minneapolis parish -- and a pedophile past. He spent time at a church-run retreat for priests of his type and returned "rehabilitated" and even better equipped to keep his vice active and hidden. That is, until the blackmail begins, and each demand tops the next. Fiendishly comic and darkly hypnotic, The Priest is a spellbinding work that builds at breakneck speed to its gripping, gruesome, and eerily romantic finale.
"A novel of considerable originality."
-New York Times Book Review
University of Minnesota Press | 336 pages | 2010
ISBN 978-0-8166-7213-4 | paper | $16.95
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 The Sub
A Study in Witchcraft
Thomas M. Disch
Foreword by Elizabeth Hand
A black comedy tour-de-force now
in paperback
The Sub, the fourth novel in Thomas M. Disch's Supernatural Minnesota series, which uses different supernatural horrors to satirize modern America, focuses on Diana Turney, a substitute teacher in the town of Leech Lake, Minnesota, left to care for her niece after her sister is imprisoned for the attempted murder of her philandering husband. Haunted by her father's ghost and disturbing repressed memories, Diana discovers she has the power to turn people into their animal totems and proceeds to transform locals into an array of creatures from spiders to pigs. Diana, her cruelty growing in proportion to her power, dismisses a warning from her father that she is destined to kill everyone she loves and continues on a spree of violence and mayhem.
"A light soufflé of black comedy, kept tantalizingly aloft by Disch's deadpan wit."
-Publishers Weekly
"Disch's mordant look at love, domesticity, and rural Minnesota can be as funny as anything dished up by Garrison Keillor or the Coen brothers."
-Star Tribune
University of Minnesota Press | 304 pages | 2010
ISBN 978-0-8166-7220-2 | paper | $16.95
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