The Word of God

Thomas M. Disch
The Word of God

Tachyon Publications, 2008

Reviewing the book written by God through normal review standards is something not quite right and comfortable. And fearful - all written God may deem blasphemous, on the one hand, and on the other - What to fear of if God who wrote a book is not worshiped and prayed by you? Disch, like any creator who creates his own world with his commandments, found such a comparison is quite appropriate for a literary game.
This novella can be read as a satirical statement about religion, but it's better to read like quite inventive memoir. Now, when Disch is no longer alive, the book looks like a logical final of writing career. Here is the places about the thoughts on suicide, and Disch-poet (in a book published a few poems), and the plans for the future, and Philip Dick, and the youth of the writer, and his old age, and on creativity, in the end ends. This is quite unevenly written book (sometimes the author forgets where he starts), but it has things for which we read books, including those ones that are not written by gods but by men: fear, hope, love, death, despair, sadness. In the text of the book Disch puts some short stories that make up a coherent story about Disch itself, his mother, Philip Dick, Thomas Mann, 39th year, and of course, this is all science fiction that Dish wrote all his life.
And if at the beginning of reading this book, we still doubt whether the author is God, then at the end we don’t anymore. Now it seems clear: God is.