The Priest

A Gothic Romance

2010
Author:

Thomas M. Disch
Foreword by Gregory Feeley

The third—and most controversial—installment in Thomas M. Disch’s Supernatural Minnesota series

At the center of Thomas M. Disch’s novel The Priest is Father Patrick Bryce, a Catholic priest with a present-day Minneapolis parish—and a pedophile past. Fiendishly comic and darkly hypnotic, The Priest is a spellbinding work that builds at breakneck speed to its gripping, gruesome, and eerily romantic finale.

Wickedly funny. If the Roman Catholic Church still issued its Index of banned books, this one would certainly find its way onto it.

Library Journal

At the center of Thomas M. Disch’s novel The Priest is Father Patrick Bryce, a Catholic priest with a present-day Minneapolis parish—and a pedophile past. He spent time at a church-run retreat for priests of his type and returned “rehabilitated” and even better equipped to keep his vice active and hidden. That is, until the blackmail begins, and each demand tops the next. Fiendishly comic and darkly hypnotic, The Priest is a spellbinding work that builds at breakneck speed to its gripping, gruesome, and eerily romantic finale.

Thomas M. Disch (1940–2008) was a best-selling and prolific American science fiction writer and poet. He won several awards, including the Hugo Award for Best Non-Fiction Book in 1999.

Gregory Feeley is the author of many novellas and short stories, as well as the novel Arabian Wine.

Wickedly funny. If the Roman Catholic Church still issued its Index of banned books, this one would certainly find its way onto it.

Library Journal

Nothing is sacred in The Priest, Thomas Disch’s nefarious novel about madness and guilt, perversion and damnation, sin and shenanigans. What a show Disch puts on.

San Francisco Chronicle

A novel of considerable originality.

New York Times Book Review

Minneapolis, ‘hometown of Betty Crocker and Mary Tyler Moore,’ is now the stamping ground of a thrill-killer from the thirteenth century. Creepy and darkly funny.

Entertainment Weekly