The Businessman: A Tale of Terror

First Edition, 1st printing. Bright, clean & tight copy, unread, in AS NEW condition. "Murdering your wife might not sound all that difficult, and in the case of Bob Glandier it was dead simple. Agenda: fly to Las Vegas, enter the Lady Luck Motor Lodge, strangle, get back on the plane to Minnesota, and resume life as an upper-echelon executive. What came after was not so simple. Still in the grave when the novel opens, and none too pleased, Bob's wife Giselle can foresee that she will be obliged to haunt him.[]The ghost of poet John Berryman plays a major---often heroic---role in this drama, which is just as well because at the time he meets Giselle he has become thoroughly bored with suburban seances (his dyslexia making him particularly hopeless at Ouija boards).[]How a novel can at once be so lighthearted and so utterly terrifying is something only Thomas M. Disch can answer. THE BUSINESSMAN is like The Exorcist in a playful mood.[]'Who would have thought that the afterlife had some many rules?' asks Berryman. Many murders and unspeakable horrors later, it seems oddly clear that terms could never have been struck with the businessman any other way." [jacket copy] "Tom Disch is our Rabelais, and THE BUSINESSMAN is pure Pantagruelism---zestful, loving, mischievous. I laughed right through it."---John Calvin Batchelor. "From the master's hand, this intricate netsuke of otherworldly slapstick and nastiness."---James Merrill. Near-perfect copy, not bad for a 37-year-old book, all intact & ready to horrify.…