A review by nigellicus
The Priest by Thomas M. Disch
5.0
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 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.
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 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.