Imaginary Toads

By Paul Gray

GETTING INTO DEATH AND OTHER STORIES

by THOMAS M. DISCH

227 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

It is one thing to cerebrate; to narrate is quite another. On the evidence of these 16 collected tales, Author Thomas M. Disch, 36, can do both. Previously known as a writer of science fiction, Disch includes only one story--The Planet Arcadia--in the intergalactic mode. The rest adhere to a bizarre present that only the likes of Lewis Carroll or John Collier could produce.

Thus in The Colors, the stages of a love affair are portrayed as a psychedelic journey through the spectrum of the rainbow, from red to violet to the annihilation of white. The Birds offers two talking ducks (Curtis and Daffy) trying to fly south through a polluted world; surprisingly, the effect is neither grotesque nor maudlin. Death and the Single Girl revises a page from Woody Allen. An unemployed office worker decides to end it all. Death, an overworked businessman, makes sexual demands in return for his service ("I come and you go"). Failing at that, he offers her a job as his secretary. "If you couldn't be dead," the girl reasons, "this was the next best thing."

In other modes, Disch shows how terror can arise through the disturbances of ordinary life. In The Asian Shore, a young American scholar living in Istanbul keeps bumping into a bedraggled Turkish woman who seems to know him. It is, he decides at first, a simple case of mistaken identity--until some frightening events make him suspect that the mistake is his own. On a sunny morning, the brother and sister in Let Us Hasten Quickly to the Gate of Ivory try to visit their parents' graves and succumb to "subdued, also meditative horror" when they realize that they are lost in a limitless cemetery.

Seedy Cineasts. Occasionally Disch eschews eeriness and plays it straight--with a twist. The Joycelin Schranger Story is both a witty send-up of seedy Manhattan cineasts and the disconcerting tale of a projectionist trapped in a laughably bad movie. Getting Into Death, the collection's longest and best story, follows a writer through the last weeks of her fatal illness. On paper she is two writers: Cassandra Knye, a successful purveyor of gothic romances, and B.C. Millar, author of esoteric murder mysteries. Chain-smoking cigarettes and wisecracking with a stream of hospital visitors, she searches stoically among her own past fictions for the kind of lie that will prepare her for her final scene with death.

Unless it is yoked to technology, the past or the future, fantasy makes many adults nervous, as if they had discovered imaginary toads in their real gardens. Disch shows that an unfettered imagination need not be childish or frivolous. His stories show just how serious fancies can be.

Paul Gray

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