[TheBentKangaroo]

The writer of Electronic Arts' 1986 game Amnesia shot and killed himself on July 4th.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-disch8-2008jul08,0,2416990.story

For those who haven't played his game, I would recommend doing so...with a walkthrough. It is maddening (unless you love hunger puzzles), but the prose is delicious and the story engrossing.

[youfightlikeadairyfarmer]

I'd never heard of him, but he wrote The Brave Little Toaster, which they made an awesome movie of. That's really sad that he killed himself.

[Steve Ince]

What a real shame. Camp Concentration was one of the best novels I've read.

[Melanie68]

This is a great article about him in Salon.com. I'll post the link, but you'll need to sit through an ad before it will come up (it doesn't take long). I've never read anything by him, but I will have to do so. I'll also check out the game sometime (which they only briefly mention in the article).

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2008/07/11/disch/

Originally Posted by Elizabeth Hand

He had a wonderful speaking voice, fluid and seductive. He sounded like John Malkovich, and he looked a bit like Malkovich too, in his prime. I grew up reading Disch's work, starting with "The Roaches" as a 12-year-old and devouring the novels as I got older. I first met him casually in the late 1980s, but only got to know him and his partner, poet Charles Naylor, during the last eight years or so -- far too brief a time. Tall and physically imposing, in public Disch could project a slightly threatening aloofness, with his shaved head, impressive tattoos, bodybuilder's mass. The silken voice that emerged from that intimidating form made him seem even more dangerous, one of those wizards who is subtle and quick to anger.

But then he'd dissolve in laughter and it would all suddenly seem to be a pose, a disguise, part of a vast elaborate joke that you were in on -- maybe. He could be irascible, scathingly dismissive; he held grudges and burned bridges. In recent years he'd put on weight, which exacerbated other problems: diabetes, sciatica, neuoropathy, depression. He had difficulty walking and was almost housebound.

And since the turn of the millennium he'd endured a Job-like succession of personal tragedies, beginning with a fire that severely damaged the apartment he shared with Naylor, his partner of 30 years; frozen pipes that caused a mold infestation at his house in Barryville, N.Y.; Naylor's long illness and eventual death from colon cancer; and, finally, eviction proceedings begun by the landlord almost immediately after Naylor's death.

During this siege Disch struggled with crushing grief and depression -- only a real deity would not -- yet he also had a humorous resignation that seemed very close to valor. He once said, "I am certainly a 'death of God' writer," and much of his work seems fueled by the rage and sense of betrayal of a former believer, as well as a refined sense of the ridiculousness of religious institutions, and the ultimate, absurd realization that we all die alone. His best work builds on Eugene Ionesco's dictum: "We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously."