The best thing that can happen when you're in a Tom Disch book is to die and die fast.ĭisch died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound on July 4, 2008, and, if one so desires, Endzone can be read as a suicide letter.
is part of Disch's Supernatural Minnesota quartet which takes place in a mid-American landscape where supernatural forces manipulate humans via desire, hate, and despair, and God is understood only through his absence.
Here is Disch's worldview in miniature: we are doomed by forces we have no conception of, forces which invariably bring out the worst in us.
In The M.D.: A Horror Story (1991), a god strikes a bargain with a preteen unable to grasp its grave consequences. Death is explicitly referenced in the titles of Endzone and his 1973 story collection Getting Into Death. 334's (1972) final monologue is in the form of a verbal application for euthanasia. His first novel The Genocides (1965) ends with the extinction of the human race. Despite its shortcomings, though, Endzone should be considered Disch's final work, if only for its brinksmanship with his career-long obsession with death.Īs fellow author and critic John Clute has observed, Disch treated death "as a game, deadly of course, but beauteous" throughout his entire career. It is also xenophobic, vindictive, full of doggerel and despair, and altogether difficult to endure. Endzone does not live up to the stylistic mastery of its precursors as its author's first encounter with what may be considered a bastard form, it is at times near amateur in composition. The former prefigures David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress in its referential narrative the latter is a scabrous satire of the social novel circa 2025. His novels Camp Concentration (1968) and 334 (1972) are twin high points of New Wave science fiction. Disch left behind a prolific output of poetry, criticism, libretti, plays, film treatments, and text for computer games, but it is a series of highly-stylized and vicious fictions presenting a hopeless America as stand-in for mankind for which he is primarily remembered. Disch's Endzone, a LiveJournal kept from Apuntil July 2, 2008, two days before Disch's death. New entries cannot be posted to it." So reads the banner above Thomas M. Ariel Hameon, Science fiction author Thomas M.
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