On their journey, the appliances encounter numerous harrowing adventures where they learn to work together. The appliances connect a car battery to an office chair pulled by Kirby and set out into the world, following Radio's signal broadcast from the city where Rob has moved to. Not wanting to accept the fact that the Master would abandon them, Toaster decides that the group should head out and find Rob. On the second day of July, the appliances are devastated to learn that a real estate broker is selling the house. They wait every day at Rob's cottage for his return with an increasing sense of abandonment, which causes Blanky to hallucinate about finally seeing Rob coming back causing him to break down in tears. Toaster is the leader of a gang of appliances consisting of a radio, a lamp named 'Lampy', a blanket named 'Blanky', and a vacuum cleaner named 'Kirby' who belong to their 'master' a young boy named Rob.Disch committed suicide by gunshot on July 4, 2008.The synopsis below may give away important plot points.

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. 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 mr toussaint