From Amazon.com
All is not remotely well in the unusual town of Leech Lake, Minnesota. Substitute teacher Diana Turney has lost her job, and is finally beginning to recall long-lost memories of being molested by her father, Wes. To make matters worse, Wes's ghost is beginning to stir in the old smokehouse--the house that Diana has moved back into so she can take care of her sister's child, Kelly. Her sister has been shipped off to the big house to serve a year behind bars after taking a shot at her philandering husband, Carl.
Diana exacts her revenge on Carl by turning him into a pig, courtesy of some supernatural powers that she has recently inherited. But Diana's "gift" is slowly bringing her over to the dark side (and slowly turning the residents of Leech Lake into barnyard animals), with a bit of help from dear old dad out in the backyard. Luckily, there are a few good characters like Jim Cottonwood who keep things from getting totally out of hand. But Cottonwood is also in the joint, sentenced for a rape he didn't commit.
It may sound pretty confusing, but you'll find yourself thoroughly caught up in Thomas M. Disch's bizarre, satirical story of life, love, and death in the supernatural Midwest. --Craig Engler
From Publishers Weekly
Disch's Supernatural Minnesota novelsAwhich include The Businessman: A Tale of Terror; The M.D.: A Horror Story; and The Priest: A Gothic RomanceAcomprise a mock epic on modern American values. This new addition to the series builds on the achievement of its predecessors and secures his tenure as the Swift of supernatural satire. The titular "sub" is Diana Turney, a second-grade teacher hired by the Willowville elementary school after two of its faculty are prosecuted for satanic abuse of students. Diana seems just a harmless eccentricAprone to lacing her lessons with gleanings from her unorthodox beliefs in Wicca and vegetarianismAuntil a session with her astrologer-therapist uncovers repressed memories of sexual mistreatment by her father. Empowered by her new awareness, and aided by a magic herbal tea brewed from mandrake root, Diana becomes a latter-day Circe who entices men sexually and then transforms them physically into the image of their (mostly) piggish natures. This unsympathetic portrait of the victim turned predator is just part of Disch's broad and refreshingly unrestrained critique of our current culture of dysfunction and victimization, represented by a large cast of social misfits that includes Diana's sister Janet, who is serving a prison stint for shooting her husband during one of his adulterous liaisons, and her sexually na?ve paramour, Alan Johnson, who discovers he's been sired by his grandfather, a Protestant minister. Though the characters are tabloid fodder, and the ingredients of the complex plotAwhich include incest, parenticide, emasculation, serial murder, cannibalism and religious hypocrisyApotentially weighty, the novel is a light souffl? of black comedy, kept tantalizingly aloft by Disch's deadpan wit. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
