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jackiijackii's review
2.0
I was liking it until the middle, and then it got tedious. I didn't like even one character by the end.
nigellicus's review
5.0
Sometimes rereading a book is like reading it for the first time. I first read this when it originally came out in 1999 - the year I got married! Yay! - but I have no real memory of what happened in it. I was pretty sure there were pigs involved somewhere.
This was the last book in Disch's Supernatural Minnesota series, and it mines familiar Dischian themes of fundamentalist religion and the banality of evil. It's a masterful, assured, wonderfully written tale of ghosts and witchcraft and shamanism, all grounded in mundane and familiar human passions and foibles and failings. Disch had a keen satirist's eye, and though he saved the worst of his ire for Christian intolerance, wiccans and atheists and Indian skinwalkers prove no less evil and destructive.
Diana Turney is a substitute teacher out of work after a scandal shuts down her school. While her sister is in prison for shooting her husband, she goes to live with the husband to care for their daughter Kelly. She recovers memories of her father abusing her as a child and encounters his malevolent ghost in the smokehouse of the family home, and suddenly she has the power to turn people into animals. A large cast of characters is drawn into the web of evil she weaves with her new-found abilities, corrupting innocence and unearthing horrible secrets.
Disch carries off a complex plot full of the unexpected with ease and skill and invents a range of flawed and interesting characters depicted with unflinching accuracy. Not as dazzling and epic as The MD, perhaps, but then The MD may be one of the best books ever, but still a brilliant horror novel of rare literary merit, moral complexity and real power.
This was the last book in Disch's Supernatural Minnesota series, and it mines familiar Dischian themes of fundamentalist religion and the banality of evil. It's a masterful, assured, wonderfully written tale of ghosts and witchcraft and shamanism, all grounded in mundane and familiar human passions and foibles and failings. Disch had a keen satirist's eye, and though he saved the worst of his ire for Christian intolerance, wiccans and atheists and Indian skinwalkers prove no less evil and destructive.
Diana Turney is a substitute teacher out of work after a scandal shuts down her school. While her sister is in prison for shooting her husband, she goes to live with the husband to care for their daughter Kelly. She recovers memories of her father abusing her as a child and encounters his malevolent ghost in the smokehouse of the family home, and suddenly she has the power to turn people into animals. A large cast of characters is drawn into the web of evil she weaves with her new-found abilities, corrupting innocence and unearthing horrible secrets.
Disch carries off a complex plot full of the unexpected with ease and skill and invents a range of flawed and interesting characters depicted with unflinching accuracy. Not as dazzling and epic as The MD, perhaps, but then The MD may be one of the best books ever, but still a brilliant horror novel of rare literary merit, moral complexity and real power.
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