Ghost Ship: Poems - Hardcover

Kinzie, Mary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679446451 ISBN 13: 9780679446453

Publisher: Knopf, 1996

Synopsis

Since his work first be to appear in the early 1960s, Thomas Disch has proven himself, again and again, to be one of the most prodigiously talented novelist/playwright/poets of our time. In Newsweek he was saluted by Walter Clemons as "the most formidably gifted unfamous American writer." But in 1991, with the publication of The M.D., Disch's remarkably various gifts converged in a horror novel that propelled him into the mainstream even as it remade the genre in its own startling image. Now, in The Priest, Disch gives us an even more potent, darkly hypnotic, and fiendishly comic novel -- a gothic romance like no other.

At the center: Father Patrick Bryce, a Catholic priest with a present-day Minneapolis parish -- and a pedophile past. He's spent time at a church-run retreat for priests of his persuasion and returned "rehabilitated": even better equipped to keep his vice active and hidden.

Until the blackmail begins.

It comes from three different sources (his own bishop being one), and each tops the next in imaginative proposals: Father Pat must head a militant (and probably illegal) anti-abortion campaign; Father Pat must apologize to each of his victims, face-to-face; Father Pat must read, and be ready to discuss, the work of a bizarre cult science fiction writer, and get the face of Satan tattooed on his chest. But the blackmailers and their demands are the least of Father Pat's problems. More dire is his increasingly incontrovertible sense that the nightmares in which he has been leading the life of a thirteenth-century bishop are not dreams at all. And that the Church, rife with corruption and scandal in both eras, is the only realistic sanctuary for him and his doppelganger, Bishop Silvanus de Roquefort, as they move -- at once separately and together -- through their own centuries-spanning maze of soul-killing horrors toward a distinctly hellish destiny. The astonishments, mayhem, and villainy they encounter along the way come brilliantly to life in an eerie and wildly populated narrative that builds at breakneck speed to its gripping, gruesome, and romantic finale.

The Priest is a spellbinding confirmation of Thomas Disch's standing as a master conjurer of the most darkly compelling tales.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Summers of Vietnam is "a stepping stone for her into the company of writers we listen to with careful attention and anticipation. She has a wide range of subject, she writes with an arresting verbal complexity, and her eye is on the serious and resonant in human experience... It would be a mistake to try to put a limit on what she may eventually accomplish."

-- Alfred Corn

"Book after book has provided Mary Kinzie with fresh vectors of challenge, in the reorientations of a volatile and many-faceted talent . . . Autumn Eros makes it clear that the task of imaginative renewal is an ongoing one, and gives new rigor and intimacy to her continuing achievement. She can be counted on to speak in her own way on her own terms, to the conspicuous enhancement of a vocation and an idiom which place her in the forefront of her contemporaries."

-- Ben Belitt

"Several poems in Autumn Eros are about Kinzie's childhood... Of these poems the great one is 'Strawberry Pipe,' one of the most profoundly beautiful poems by an American that I've read in several years."

About the Author

Thomas Disch is the author of eleven previous novels, including such classic works of science fiction as Camp Concentration, 334, and On Wings of Song, five short story collections, and six volumes of poetry, most recently Dark Verses and Light. His one-act play, The Cardinal Detoxes, has been vigorously protested by the Catholic Church. He reviews theater for the New York Daily News.

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0679446451
• ISBN 13: 9780679446453
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 82