The Businessman

Blurb

The Businessman: A Tale of Terror is a novel by American writer Thomas M. Disch, published by Harper & Row in 1984. The Businessman is a contemporary novel, a form that Disch — best known for his science fiction — had not hitherto tried, although all of his subsequent adult novels have shared its milieu.
The novel is about Robert Glandier, a Minneapolis businessman who murders his wife, Giselle, and is later haunted by her; his mother-in-law, Joy-Ann Anker; and various historical characters—including the ghost of poet John Berryman, whose 1972 suicide has left him in a beleaguered posthumous condition, and Adah Isaacs Menken, the 19th century actress, who conducts Joy-Ann through the afterlife. The novel is a mordant and complexly-plotted metaphysical thriller, which follows numerous viewpoints in their characters' interactions, which culminates in a sexual encounter between the ghost Giselle and her murderer Glandier, and the resulting conception of a demonic foetus.