On Wings of Song. Thomas M. Disch (St. Martin's Press, $10.00). Painted Devils. Robert Aickman (Charles Scribner's Sons, $8.95). Kindred. Octavia Butler (Doubleday & Company, $8.95). Universe 9. Ed. Terry Carr (Doubleday & Company, $7.95). New Dimensions 9. Ed. Robert Silverberg (Harper & Row, $10.95). The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. Ursula Le Guin, ed. Susan Wood (G.P. Putnam's Sons, $9.95)

Thomas Disch is a sinister writer. I mean by this that his work – most strikingly his latest novel, On Wings of Song – is an ominous attack on the morals and good customs of Middle America. I also mean that Disch, although an insider-turned-outsider (according to the flap copy of his story collection, Fun With Your New Head, he grew up in Minnesota, one of the repressive “Farm States” of Song, and “escaped” to New York), is not a direct revolutionary but a left-handed user of such methods as irony, parody, exaggeration, and other forms of oblique subversion. Bitterness lies under the surface of his wit, or rather is conveyed via his wit, and Song is sometimes chilly and disagreeable in its unremitting view of desolation. Although there is a revolution for the better, it takes place (typically for Disch) offstage, and in comparison with the conventional treatment “sympathetic” characters receive in most fiction, Song's people may strike readers as abrasively unpleasant. In part Song compensates with comedy; in part Disch simply doesn't care to gum up his art with the karo syrup of conventional sympathy. When one's subject is the art of survival as practiced in extreme situations, auctorial button-pushings of readers' feelings are merely impertinent. For one thing, they assume that suffering matters only when it happens to nice people. And they neglect the indictment of a whole culture, which is Song's real subject. In place of the moral judgments which usually pass for characterization in literature, Disch gives us close attention to the how and why of behavior; even the mad Mrs. Norberg and the awful, elder Mueller are treated with analytical care and a kind of respect. When a prison-mate's family sends him not food at Christmas (the prisoners are deliberately starved by the authorities) but snapshots of their Thanksgiving dinner, the protagonist's reaction is fascination, not moral indignation – moral indignation is, after all, a luxury of the relatively secure; the truly powerless can't afford it.