Sub : A Study in Witchcraft

by Disch, Thomas M.

• ISBN13: 9780679442929
• ISBN10: 0679442928
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-07-01
• Publisher: Knopf

Summary

FollowingThe Businessman,The M.D., andThe Priest, Thomas M. Disch, heralded byNewsweekas "the most formidably gifted unfamous American writer," now continues his masterful series of horror-fantasy novels set in his own "supernatural Minnesota." At the very moment substitute teacher Diana Turney recovers memories of sexual abuse at the hands of her father, she finds herself weilding a potent brand of witchcraft: the Circe-like ability to turn people into their totemic animals. But once she unleashes these exhilarating matamorphoses on the citizens of the small hamlet of Leech Lake, she learns that she has not been given these powers so much as she has been given to them; that others, including her enemies, have similar gifts; that she has become the conduit of her ghastly father's evil energies, long dormant but now sprung to life; and that despite her unearthly gifts, escape this time might prove impossible. A work of fiendishly pleasurable plotting and prose,The Subweaves a myriad number of strandsincluding New Age, Native American, and fundamentalist thinkinginto a tapestry that is ethically devious, blackly comic, and increasingly horrifying.

Author Biography

Thomas M. Disch is the author of twelve previous novels, including such classic works of science fiction as <b>Camp Concentration</b> and <b>334</b>, both of which have been reissued in Vintage paperback. He lives in Manhattan and in Sullivan County, New York.

Excerpts

From Chapter One

"And what sound do pigs make, class?" Diana demanded of her children.

There was only a scattering of giggles in reply. No one raised a hand. They seemed, to Diana's practiced eye, unnaturally shy. Little wonder, in view of the media circus that the school had become in the last few weeks. The Goddess only knew what must be going through their minds. To carry on as though nothing had changed scarcely seemed possible, but Diana Turney was not one to be daunted by that. Impossible deeds could be done if you summoned the determination.

          "Lloyd." She looked down at the Brandt boy in the front row of desks, where she put potential troublemakers. "Can you tell us?"

          Lloyd Brandt scowled up at her with a resentment that was pure instinct, as a small rodent might regard an object in nature that happened to have the shape of an owl or a fox. Diana intended him no harm, and yet there was a kind of wisdom in his scowl, for they were, at some primordial level, enemies. She knew the sort of man he'd become in the fullness of time. His fate was written in his face--in the set of his jaw and the squint of his eyes, in the bristling buzz-cut blond hair and rosy cheeks that would someday sprout whiskers and droop into jowls. Yes, he did well to fear her--or any woman who had her wits about her.

          "Well, Lloyd: a pig, what sound does it make? Does it go cluck-cluck?"

          The class giggled, which Lloyd took to be an act of communal betrayal, and he scowled all the fiercer.

          "Does it go moo?"

          "No."

          "Well, then: tell us."

          "Oink," said Lloyd inexpressively, as though it were a word on the blackboard.

          "Oink," she repeated, just as flatly, but pinning him down with her eyes. "Thank you, Lloyd. Now we all know what noise a pig makes. Now we can continue singing. Class." She lifted her ruler, demanding silence.

          And then they sang, at the ruler's bidding, the rest of the song--with an oink-oink here and an oink-oink there; here an oink, there an oink, everywhere an oink-oink. And so on with the clucks, the moos, the quacks, the baas.

          As they sang, she couldn't keep from matching the various children with the animals in the song. Surely chubby little Cheryl Sondergard was destined to be a hen, and there were at least two blue-ribbon contestants in the bovine category. But the lambs were the great majority. When it came to a baa-baa here and a baa-baa there, some of the lambs could really get into it. Method acting in the second grade.

          Logically, that made her their shepherd--not a role she entirely rejoiced in, despite its venerable tradition. Jesus was the Good Shepherd, but what did He have for dinner on Passover? Not just bread and wine, in all likelihood.

          "That's a fun song, isn't it?" she said, setting the ruler down on her desk.

          They nodded warily--cowed (or chickened or pigged, as the case might be) by the automatic transmission of her confidence. That was the whole secret of teaching, whether one had to deal with second graders or seventh graders (and those were the worst). Even in the movies you could tell a good teacher by the way he (and they were usually he's in the movies) took charge right off the bat. Okay, class, let me show you what I know about karate!

          "Okay, class," she said brightly. "Have any of you ever been to a real farm?"

          Not a single hand went up.

          Amazing. Here they were in Minnesota, in a suburb, Willowville, that was bordered, at least on its northern edge, by working dairy farms, and none of these children had ever been on a farm. It was altogether possible that their parents hadn't either. She might as well have asked them if they'd ever been to Rome or to Jerusalem. A farm to them was only an illustration in a picture book. If she'd been teaching in one of the inner-city schools, their ignorance might have been still more profound. Oink and moo and baa and cluck no longer related, for most children, to any observable reality. Farm animals were mythical entities, like dragons and fairies and wizards and witches, that belonged to a world that used to be and was no more.

          Diana Turney meant to correct that. "I grew up on a farm," she told them. "A real farm, with all the animals that there are in the song. Cows and sheep and pigs and chickens. No ducks, except in the hunting season, when there were wild ducks. In the morning I used to go out to the chicken coop and get the eggs the hens had laid. They were there in the straw, still warm. Not like the eggs that come out of your mothers' refrigerators. Sometimes there were little drops of red blood inside the egg, which meant it might have become another chicken if we hadn't taken it out of the chicken's nest and fried it."

          Cheryl Sondergard turned sideways to her friend and cousin Gerry Kruger and made a face expressive of disgust.

          Diana smiled. "That's where chickens come from, you know. They come from eggs. Did you know that, Cheryl?"

          "Yes, Ms. Turney," said Cheryl, dismayed at having been singled out.

          "Yes indeed, every egg we eat might have grown up to be a chicken if it had been given the chance to do that." This was not true, of course, for not every egg is fertilized, but children in second grade were not aware of such niceties, and the concept of fertilization was not in the assigned curriculum for second graders in Willowville's public schools. Diana knew the boundaries of her position and took care not to overstep them.

          "And where do hamburgers come from? Does anyone know?"

          "From McDonald's!" crowed the smallest and youngest of her children, little Earl Wagner, who knew perfectly well where hamburgers came from. He was teasing her, and showing off.

          "Quite true," Diana replied, unruffled. "But of course you mean the McDonald's in the Willowville mall, not Old MacDonald's farm. I often wonder if there might be a connection. Maybe the McDonald's in the mall gave itself that name to remind us of the song. Because the song is much, much older than the restaurant. I learned to sing it when I was the age that you children are now, and before that my mother and father sang it when they went to school. And that was a time when everyone, even the smallest children, would have known what a farm was like. Because Minnesota was filled with farms then. If you didn't live on a farm yourself, you would certainly have relatives who did, and you'd visit them on the holidays. And so you would know where hamburgers come from. They come from cows. Surely you all knew that, didn't you?"

          The children stared at her, in fear. Not of her but of what they sensed was coming next.

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Excerpted from The Sub: A Study in Witchcraft by Thomas M. Disch
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