Never Trust the Clergy This book, like all the Supernatural Minnesota series (this is volume 3), has so much going on in it at so many levels that that it is hard to distill it much less deconstruct it. On the surface it is a trashing of the Catholic Church, Scientology, and Pro-Lifers. Disch also takes a few swipes at his sf brethren who he considered insane or just plain con men (L. Ron Hubbard, Philip K. Dick, and Whitley Streiber). The tone of the book is more pessimistic than the others in the series, but like the others pretty much everyone ends up dead, except the pedophile main character Father Bryce himself who ends up in the big house, although he may really be 16th century inquisitor Silvanus de Roquefort and Father Bryce may just be getting his just desserts on the rack back in the 16th century. Or maybe Bryce is just another crazy. Anyway, Silvanus/Bryce sees the 20th century as just a dandy place for sinners to hang out. At the same time it's hard to find a Catholic clergyman or nun who can keep their dick/pussy in their pants be it straight, gay, rape, or toddler sex. Oh, and the so-called pro-lifers/anti-contraception nuts are ironically the most murderous of the lot in their fanatical desire to save unborn fetuses and prevent spilt seed.As in the other volumes of the series, what goes around comes around and you can either call it fate or coincidence although I think Disch probably just believes that shit happens to the guilty and the innocent alike and there isn't a lot of reason to try to take any meaning out of all of it.One truly normal average unmarried pair, however in no way innocent, manages to crawl out of this cesspool/nightmare and actually have the child they were originally going to abort, just another of Disch's ironies not some spiritual or moral message. Disch is always winking at us, daring us to read something into spaces where he doesn't mean to imply anything other than to get love where we can. That's the only point of course. ( )

Reading through the Supernatural Minnesota series again, I was struck by how well they go together in spite of their different premises and contradictory events... and also by how incredibly much better this one book is than I remembered. Maybe it's that it feels less detached; Disch's irony is always ten feet deep, and so it is here too, but he's writing about the Catholic Church and he clearly had some very, very strong and complicated feelings about it, so there's a little more sweat visible. The horrible things are horrible, the love is real, and all of it is uncomfortable and hilarious. You'll need some extra-strong suspension of disbelief as it veers from one type of gothic tall tale to another, but somehow it all holds together, I think. (Speaking of which: if you get the new edition with an introduction by Gregory Feeley, read the intro after the book. It's interesting in a sort of dry theoretical way, but it gives away a big plot twist.) Also, I was just very happy to see Bing and Queen Mab from The Businessman again. ( )

Heh. What a great read. I absolutely love Disch. I'd give this five stars except that would attract the wrong audience. If Shakespeare is like fine wine, Disch is like a double shot of Old Heaven Hill. (Yep.) ( )

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 he taint of scandal 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. ( )

Terrific story. the twist and turns maje this one of my favorite books. ( )