Disch committed suicide by gunshot on July 4, 2008. It’s about a toaster and a few other abandoned housewares who reside in an empty house, awaiting the return of their master, a small boy who used to live there. Disch's best known work, though, is The Brave Little Toaster, a reworking of the Brothers Grimm's 'Town Musicians of Bremen' featuring wornout domestic appliances - what was written as a satire on sentimentality became a successful children's animated musical. If you’ve never seen The Brave Little Toaster, it’s a lot like Toy Story, except with appliances. In recent years, Disch had turned to ironically moralized horror novels like The Businessman, The MD, The Priest and The Sub in which the nightmare of American suburbia is satirized through the terrible things that happen when the magical gives people the chance to do what they really really want.

His sf novels include Camp Concentration, with its colony of prisoners mutated into super-intelligence by the bacteria that will in due course kill them horribly, and On Wings of Song, in which many of the brightest and best have left their bodies for what may be genuine, or entirely illusory, astral flight and his hero has to survive until his lover comes back to him both are stunningly original books and both are among sf's more accomplishedly bitter-sweet works.

Disch brought to the sf of the New Wave a camp sensibility and a sardonicism that too much sf had lacked.

The brave little toaster preview