The Spinner: Response to a Darwinian feminist.
Jane Donawerth's Frankenstein's Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction (Syracuse University Press, 1996) is one of the few academic/scholarly surveys (perhaps the only one?) discussing Doris Piserchia's work, and the author certainly deserves better. Donawerth analyzes Piserchia's 1980 novel The Spinner in a chapter titled "Cross-Dressing as a Male Narrator," which sums up various narrative strategies used by female writers to subvert sf's "single, male point of view" (she mentions Spaceling and Star Rider under "Beautiful Alien Monster-Women--BAMs," but only briefly, in footnotes). She chooses The Spinner as an example of how a woman author "critiqu[es] the concept of masculine rivalry" through the use of multiple points of view.
The story's rivalry, according to Donawerth, is between Mordak, a web-spinning extraterrestrial accidentally brought to Earth during an interdimensional mining operation, and Ekler, a policeman in Eastland, the smallish American city where Mordak turns up. As Mordak institutes a reign of terror, slaying humans and laying thousands of alien eggs around Eastland, Ekler valiantly defends city, family, and "his women" (a girlfriend, who dies, and later, a young college student, with whom he briefly teams up). By the end of the book, Donawerth writes, "we can see that the goals of alien monster and human police are disturbingly similar: kill the other male so that territory and reproduction goes to one's own kind."
By imposing this Darwinian reading on the story, Donawerth, a self-described '60s-activist-turned-feminist-scholar, actually misstates it, and forecloses other ways the reader might find it subversive. First, to characterize Ekler as the "human police" with "disturbingly similar" goals to the alien is a slippery elision: throughout the book he is a sympathetic character, who dotes on a mentally disabled younger sister and finds himself at odds with the corrupt local police and clueless military men who cordon off Eastland. Secondly, although Mordak is described as a "he," he is actually a cunning hybrid of "male" and "female" attributes, who claws and bites, oozes "lacquer" that hardens into tough webbing, hatches baby Spinners, and then defends them fiercely. One could just as easily interpret The Spinner as a battle of the sexes in which the female kicks serious ass.
Yet even if one accepts Donawerth's limited, sociobiological reading of the story, what are we to make of her argument that Piserchia "critiques" the narrative by using multiple voices? Donawerth's thesis, in a nutshell, is that in classic science fiction, a cocksure guy in a white lab coat dominates the story, controlling the reader with his superior voice of reason, while women sf authors move from character to character, revealing a broader range of human experience. That's often the case, but if it's all they do, then James Michener and Stephen King are great radical feminists. Donawerth never convincingly explains how redistributing the narrative--jumping from Ekler's point of view to various minor characters'--"critiques" him. This isn't a Rashomon story where we doubt what we're being told.
Donawerth concludes, correctly, that "human
lack of community" rather
than the extraterrestrial is the villain of the
story, but misses The
Spinner's true subversive core--that much
of the time we're rooting
for the monster as it mauls and slimes the
acquisitive, vain, stupid humans
who have abducted it from its world. Piserchia's
seductive misanthropy
is aimed mostly at the male-dominated power
structure of Eastland, while
her real heroes--the group of elderly renegades
living in caves below the
city, and Rune, the scientific "freak" who foils
Mordak at every turn--offer
a quirky, alternative vision of society (Ekler
is nice, but these are the
characters you remember after you've read the
book). So determined is Donawerth
to knock Mr. Lab Coat off his stool, she passes
up the chance to describe
other twists and inversions of Piserchia's yarn.
And she's as grave as
a funeral home director, which makes her an
awkward interpreter of a darkly
comic writer.
I've just finished re-reading Mr. Justice, and here's my first draft of a plot synopsis, spoilers and all, and some analysis. In the novel, nothing is as it seems, but everything that seems inexplicable eventually gets explained (more or less). This discussion puts into prosaic, linear order what Piserchia poetically presents inside out, upside down, and sideways, so please read the book rather than just this summary! Just as Memento wouldn't be the same movie if related chronologically, Mr. Justice wouldn't be the same book without its fragmented, time-hopping narrative.
Main Story Arc. The book's two principal antagonists both have a psi power--a genetic fluke--that allows them to shuttle back and forth between the past and the present. They can't change the past, they can only observe it voyeuristically and learn secret information from it. When they timehop they "step out of the world," becoming temporarily invisible both now and then, but there are limits governing how far they move in time and space. They can haul others into the past by physically carrying them, one person at a time.
One of the time-travelers, Golden Macklin, teaches psychology at SPAC, a government-run school for the extraordinarily gifted. We don't know much about him, except that he's shaggy-haired, an award-winning photographer, grew up in the slums of New York, and owns a "vacation place" in the West Virginia hills that's "been in [his] wife's family for years" (and that's all we learn about his wife). He uses his power to witness crimes he knows or suspects took place. He can't stop them but he can avenge them, in one of two ways: by snapping photographs of the crime-in-progress, which he delivers to the police along with the bound-and-gagged perpetrator (apprehended in the present), or by killing the perp himself, also in the present. He does this dozens, perhaps hundreds of times, calling himself "Mr. Justice." The police have no idea how he gets his information on unsolved (or unknown) crimes, but they brand him a psychopath and declare him Public Enemy Number One.
The other time-hopper, Arthur Bingle, we know even less about. As a child, he saw a couple of animals brutally run over, which scarred him; each time he went into a coma, evidently triggering the onset of his powers. Just what turns him to the Dark Side isn't clear; perhaps his inability to reverse these childhood traumas. He builds a mafia-like criminal empire with his powers, the mechanics of which are left mostly to the reader's imagination: one example--an extortion scheme where judges' genitals are removed, iced down, and held for ransom in exchange for case dismissals--goes a long way. Bingle knows about Mr. Justice's activities but not his identity; he believes, because he has the same power, that he'll always be able to outsmart him.
The feminist critic Jane Donawerth would probably call Mr. Justice a story of males fighting for territory (as she did with The Spinner), and so it is. The Bible also meets this description, and the struggles of Justice and Bingle behind the scenes of ordinary human affairs strongly suggest the epic battles of Yahweh and the Fallen One. All human institutions--police, courts, schools--are hollow shells to be used or manipulated by these two. The cops think Justice is a menace, but Bingle is much worse; while they search desperately for the former, the latter gradually takes over the police force and government from within. He allows his agents to run amok and crime is rampant in the streets.
Through most of the book it appears that Bingle has the upper hand; that his activities are so pervasive and corrupting that he's made Justice (and justice) irrelevant. In the novel's big surprise, we learn that Justice has placed a mole in the evildoers' organization: his own daughter, Pala. Working as a bookkeeper for Bingle's number two man, Eric Fortney, she delivers names and addresses for the syndicate's various criminal operations--dope, vice, gambling--which Justice then systematically eliminates.
Bingle also has a daughter, Leona, whom he keeps sheltered. She too has time-traveling powers; unlike Bingle, she can move into the future as well as the past. Unfortunately her talent is erratic, and Bingle believes that her offspring, his grandchild, will be a fully-developed time traveler. He secretly grooms Fortney as her mate, and arranges to have her boyfriend, Cass, killed.
At the climax of the book, Bingle learns Justice's whereabouts--Macklin's West Virginia retreat--and dispatches an army of thugs to Take Him Out. The triumphant battle between Justice's small band of vigilante recruits and Bingle's goons takes place "offscreen"; in the book's final scene, Justice and Bingle meet and fight, in a weird cat-and-mouse game of microsecond feints between past and present. In a feat of amusing authorial invention (bordering on James Bond cliche), Bingle nails Justice to a tree with a speargun, which prevents him from moving in space-time. Bingle then drags Justice's wounded body into a circle of flame, and commands the injured time-traveler to dig his own grave. Suddenly...
Leona, blinking backwards and forwards in time and enraged at the murder of her lover Cass, swoops down out of the sky and grabs Bingle. Her skirt catches fire, and the two figures blink out of the present in a giant fireball. There is no denouement.
Secondary Story Arc. Justice and Bingle are actually the novel's Ahab and Moby Dick; a sizeable chunk of the narrative centers around its Ishmael, an abnormally intelligent young man named Daniel Jordan, whom the government recruits at the tender age of twelve to be a kind of super-detective, with the sole mission of catching Justice. At the beginning of the novel, Daniel attends SPAC, the government school for the gifted, where his mentor, unguessed by him, is the very person he's seeking. Macklin takes Daniel on a fishing trip to the West Virginia property, where they silently bond, but gives no hint of his identity. Daniel spends years tracking Justice, first by analyzing the crime photographs and later with the aid of a supercomputer, during which time Bingle's power grows and it becomes more and more obvious to everyone but Daniel that Justice is not the worst predator in the jungle.
Daniel refuses to abandon his obsession, and along the way acquires another: finding Pala, whom he meets and falls in love with at SPAC, and never guesses is Macklin's daughter. She disappears at age 12, when Macklin removes her from the school and plants her in Bingle's organization, but Daniel's government handlers tell him the ridiculous story that she's been sold into white slavery. There's a wonderful scene where he's working with the computer, in the empty, glassed-in lobby of the Microcom building, and sees Pala trying the door, dressed in the expensive clothes of a gangster's kept (but still chaste) woman; he chases her down the street but doesn't find her.
Eventually they reconnect, and make love. For the second time Pala asks Daniel if he will abandon his obsession with finding Justice and be with her; for the second time he refuses. At no time does he suspect that she's Justice's daughter. After a few more months of searching, he finally puts it together, and places a notice in the paper announcing to his handlers that he's abandoning the chase. The next time he sees Pala she has a baby carriage; it's her child with him. Exit Daniel and Pala from the novel.
One of the least-explored relationships in the book is Macklin's with his daughter. Throughout, it seems he's controlling her and she's not entirely happy about it. They have no dialogue: the two times he takes her away, from the school and from Bingle's man Eric Fortney, minor characters describe her as sad, or resistant. The book never explains why Macklin put her in a Swiss orphanage as a baby, and where (and who) her mother is. Given the novel's penchant for parallels, it is likely that he is grooming, or testing, Daniel as a potential mate for Pala, just as Bingle is preparing Fortney for Leona. Pala is described at one point as a "botched-up mutant sired by old man Justice," and it's likely that Justice hopes her offspring will be a complete time traveler, just as Bingle hopes Leona's child will be. There's a rather unhealthy, manipulative aspect to these dynastic aspirations; perhaps Macklin and Bingle aren't so different in this regard.
Big Themes. Piserchia deals somewhat perfunctorily with the morality of Justice's revenge program, in an exceedingly odd kangaroo court scene prior to the shoot-out with Bingle's mob. The purpose of this show trial, held outdoors at Macklin's retreat, is not to convict Justice but to acquit him. Justice allows three men through the barricades to his property: Brant, whose business has been taken over by Bingle; Bailey, one of the three G-men who've been running Daniel; and a reformed alcoholic named Tidy Crawford, who has the (latent psi?) ability to sense a person's "persuasive force." Beckoning to a circle of chairs surrounded on all sides by his triggermen, Justice orders the three men to sit and make the case for or against him. Brant is "excused" because he believes the jury isn't an adequate court-at-law. Bailey pulls a gun on Justice and makes a rather pathetic argument against vigilantism. Then Tidy pulls a gun on Bailey and declares that Bailey "isn't the person" to judge Justice. Macklin ends the charade by announcing that "maybe" the whole world will judge him some day, but right now "the hills are crawling with the enemy" and it's time to "get ready for war."
It's obvious from this scene that the author favors Justice's brand of justice, and won't be bothered to put him in jeopardy or ask him hard questions. Elsewhere in the novel, she suggests he's a new breed of human whose high intelligence and tele-temporo-kinetic powers have evolved naturally. A peripheral character named John Ridley, a victim of failed genetic tinkering (he has brains but no will), makes the following speech:
A hundred years ago they lynched people who took the law into their own hands. [Actually, isn't lynching taking the law into your own hands?] Did you ever wonder if maybe we're not just living a hundred years ahead of the past, that we may be entering a totally different existence?Unfortunately that "different existence" seems to have more in common with the Manichaean medievalism of Stephen King's post-apocalytic world in The Stand than what we think of as evolved, enlightened democracy. Justice says it himself: as long as he exists "utopia hasn't arrived." (p. 164) In this world we don't have the luxury of judging Justice (God) because Bingle (Satan) has the same super-powers. One thing Piserchia does extremely well is give us an unflinching look at the dark side. Her descriptions of child-r4pe, the inhuman mechanics of a "nod parlor" (dope den), and the post-coital death embrace of Bingle's henchpeople Godiva and Teuton (those names!), are hair-raising. Like a couple of other writers brought up in the Mormon faith, Neil LaBute and Orson Scott Card, both of whom are practicing rather than lapsed, Piserchia can Do Evil really well (there's a religious studies thesis in there somewhere). Yet even though she suggests that Mr. Justice is "thumbing his nose at God," (p. 129), he certainly has God-like powers (omniscience, omnipresence...) and is clearly the world's only hope. That little axiom about absolute power never seems to apply to him; the worst thing it does is make him more testy and impatient. He kills hundreds of people in cold blood, but we're encouraged to see him as noble, a philosopher-king.
Feminist Issues. Yet come to think of it, aren't Justice's methods those more conventionally associated with a Queen than a King? He certainly favors Livia's tactics over Augustus's (in Robert Graves' account of Imperial Rome, anyway), probing people's private lives and pasts, working through proxies, hatching plots that take years to complete. If this is a story of male rivalry, it's the most passive-aggressive horn locking in the history of macho combat. Both Justice and Bingle hide from public view throughout the story, acting quietly through agents to amass power. When Bingle takes over a company, he leaves the CEO in charge and drains the business from the shadows. As mentioned, Justice's daughter takes the greatest risk, working undercover in a lethal criminal organization--as a teenager. (Talk about living through your kids!) Until that manly spear takes flight, the competition has been one of stealth and "feminine wiles." As in many subsequent novels, Piserchia favors flight over fight as a method of dealing with an enemy. A trait that feminists criticize in women under the Patriarchy--a willingness (or conditioning) to become invisible, to operate behind the scenes--is elevated to a trickster's superpower in Piserchia's oeuvre. Star Rider, Spaceling, and The Dimensioneers all feature heroes who can creatively "step out of the world."
So does this mean Mr. Justice is a feminist book, or subverts masculinist literature? Not really. Piserchia knew her chosen genre catered to male fantasies, and during that time in American history--the early '70s, when the hippie experiment and liberal social programs were perceived to have failed, leading to a boom in street crime--everyone craved tough macho heroes (Dirty Harry, Charles Bronson's Death Wish movies). If anything, the novel isn't feminist enough, in that the only thing it can envision to save the world from chaos, crime, and corruption is another tough-talking lone wolf. Where the tale excels is in the telling. Two decades ahead of The X-Files, Mr Justice's style and mood conjure a twilight world where sinister agencies control everything and the truth has to be pieced together from incomplete, asynchronous hints. Unfortunately, that world of 2033 looks more and more plausible every day.
Addendum: Here are a few more observations, while the book is fresh on my mind:
There's also a third story arc, centered on the three government agents, Daniel's handlers. Turner has some psi ability--he penetrates Bingle's organization and is discovered. Bingle ties him to a chair and keeps him dosed with LSD, along with an ex-SPAC student named Guglielmo; the two become Bingle's "zombies": a kind of human, mind-linked computer, a "Mr. Justice-sensor." Interesting parallel between these two and "the Doll," Daniel's lifelike supercomputer. Both are post-humans searching for the superhuman; in Bruce Sterling-speak, one might be called a Shaper and the other a Mechanist. Eventually Justice rescues Turner, and Turner becomes Justice's agent. Burgess is obsessed with "the Ridleys," a group of gene-altered Brainiacs; he's convinced that one of them has to be Justice. Eventually he tracks them down and kills them, a senseless waste of life that earns him a bullet from Turner. Bailey I've already mentioned. He alone continues to consider himself a government agent, long after there is no government. What happens to him after the "trial"? Perhaps he returns in the sequel.
To partly answer a question I posed on the weblog: Yes, Pala has time-hopping powers. It explains her initial appearance, nude, in Eric Fortney's trash can. It also explains her "disappearances" after she materializes to tantalize Daniel a few times.
Finally, DP mentioned writing a sequel to this book in our interview, and there are plenty of threads to be picked up. Who knows where Bingle went? Perhaps he lives, horrible burned. We readers are owed some back story on Macklin, and of course, Pala has had a child that may be the Kwisatz Haderach, or however the hell Frank Herbert spelled it.
I'm sure I'll think of more. Oh, yeah. Who's the bigger influence here, Theodore Sturgeon or A.E. Van Vogt? Traces of both are present. I'd say the former, from the writerly way the story's told. VV deals with the superhuman a lot, but his stories don't always "add up." Piserchia's, on the other hand, really works!
Doomtime:
Humanity gets
butt kicked by super-trees.
Far in the future, the numbers of mankind have dwindled. One small population lives in a cave-ridden cliff, its needs supplied by machines it no longer understands. Strange red and green trees, all named either Tedron or Krake, begin springing up nearby, promising healing and refreshment for the mind and body...for a price.
Tree-dipping: the total immersion of one's body in the trunk of the tree, which leaves the human's mind vulnerable to the vegetable force.
What are the original Tedron and Krake up to? And what can humans do against the arborified forces of Nature? This 1980 novel is one of the weirdest of Piserchia's books, and depicts a druid's worst nightmare.
Great reading, though. I wish I had a tame Tedron or Krake nearby, and a friendly bug-snapper (who might have been inspired by Birdman's sidekick/eagle Avenger, who can be seen in reruns on Cartoon Network). I still get a chill every time I pass by a dying, red-needled lodgepole pine, surrounded by healthy green ones. Other notable Piserchia inventions here are the melting pot, called the "flesh pool," where corpses get dumped and meat is synthesized. Sometimes living creatures emerge from it, as in the case of the Twirlies, mouselike creatures that can spin themselves into deadly tornados. A semi-parasitic fungus, created by the Ancients (us?), will eat the fat from your body and leave you slim. The fungus is also painless and removable. The bug-snapper is probably a genetically altered bird of prey, which devours insects. Generally treated as an ambulatory air freshener, the bug-snapper also exhibits intelligence when treated kindly by the hero.
There is an amusing Piserchian conceit here: the hero of the book, Creed, has a brother, Drago, who is a villain for most of the piece. Creed is a nice-looking guy, I guess (a redhead, for some reason, and one of the few male primary characters in Piserchia's novels) and Drago is handsome but weak of character. We see individuals like him all over the place! They are good-looking, even intelligent sometimes, but throughly unpleasant and begging for incarceration.
Rating for this novel: 5 stars. Nicely visualized world, lots of new inventions, several bad guys with varying motivations. And killer trees who, in the end, are trapped by their own human-like, towering vanity.
--Joanna Pataki
In this 1981 novel, the monster Corradado goes
on a rampage in a utopian
sky-city, prompting the mayor to hire another
monster--an alien entity
whose consciousness shuttles back and forth
among three bodies--as contract
killer(s). The plot follows an orphan boy
fixated on killing Corradado
and a crooked alcoholic biochemist who couldn't
care less about the monster,
as they join forces (willingly or not) with the
alien hit man. As in many
of Piserchia's books, the monsters are
point-of-view characters and we
get a subversive kick out of their gleeful,
rampant destruction of a high-tech
but essentially cold-blooded urban environment.
Earth
in Twilight: Short
take.
The mise-en-scene for this novel is somewhat
reminiscent of Brian Aldiss's
Hothouse:
the world is choked by plant life and humans
have devolved into small green
tree dwellers. Also living among the vines and
branches, and up in the
tops of geosynchronous steeples (space
elevators) that tower over the forest,
are hideous monsters like Whing, an enormous
blue mite, and the Ornad,
with whom Whing's wife cohabitates after a bad
domestic argument. Far worse
is the plague organism in human form named Peru
(after "P.U.," the last
utterance of a victim who succumbed to his
charms), who wanders around
the forest causing deaths too loathsome to
describe here. Enter a spaceship
piloted by humans, who have returned after many
millennia to defoliate
the planet in a Vietnam-style ecocide called
Project Deep Green, and the
stage is set for one of Doris Piserchia's
funniest and most entertaining
books. (Sorry, I'm a sick person.)
Earth
in Twilight:
Animistic Post-history.
Doris Piserchia's 1981 novel Earth in Twilight is a bit like a low-budget film made with costumes and sets left over from a larger epic, the "epic" in this case being Brian Aldiss's Hothouse (titled The Long Afternoon of Earth in the U.S.). Both books depict a far distant future where Earth is dominated by plant life, and tribes of green-skinned humans live in the branches of world-straddling trees. Both feature massive creatures that shuttle back and forth between earth and space (Aldiss's spider-like "traversers" and Piserchia's more heterogeneous "steeple sentries"), and a villain in the form of a megalomaniac, mind-controlling parasite.
In Aldiss's book, Earth has stopped rotating and the plants on the daylight side have all but choked out human life. In Piserchia's, humans have long ago fled Terra for another star system, unaware that their home planet has been repopulated by a bizarre menagerie of plants, giant insects, and hominids with chlorophyll instead of hemoglobin. Where the former novel is a long, picaresque, somewhat melancholy tale of a doomed world, the latter is a compact comic fable in which mutant humanity triumphs.
As in other Piserchia novels, EIT weaves together elements of sf, horror, and domestic comedy into a dreamlike narrative. Monsters are often the point-of-view characters, and the reader must deduce their physiognomies from actions and sense impressions that are consistently quite disorienting (once you've begun to get comfortable with one alien body, the author transports you to another). These creatures, distant offspring of genetic experiments, are nevertheless poignantly human: they argue, tell lies, sleep around, get jealous--so human, in fact, that they make the real homo sapiens who return to Earth halfway through the novel seem like dull robots by comparison.
Whing, for example, an enormous blue mite, is convinced he's a man and regularly boots his wife out of their nest for giving birth to eggs instead of live young. Yet later, when he encounters his first real humans, he kills and eats them, thinking they're worms. The sentient plague organism Peru (EIT's counterpart to Hothouse's fungoid "morel") dreams of spreading his contagion to the stars, but the tree-people regularly humiliate him in a series of slapstick confrontations. Typical of Piserchia's tales, the violence is pleasurably sadistic: at one point the fiend's decomposing body is pitched into a hive of carnivorous bees, which tear off parts of his limbs and tunnel completely through his head.
Piserchia's writing has been characterized as feminist, yet her own ideas about feminism, at least of the militant, 1970s variety, can be found in one of EIT's scathing subplots. A tribe called the descoes seeks to deny gender differences by hiding their physical sex characteristics and refusing to admit that females give birth. Always referred to as she/he or he/she, the clan members constantly, tediously correct outsiders who dare to mention gender or reproduction. When a creature living in their midst (a ganute) openly bears a son, they murder her, and her baby is defanged, declawed, castrated, and kept around the compound as a "kicking boy." The tribe's ultimate fate--a disastrous meeting with Peru--is described by the author with Dantean vividness.
If Piserchia is centrist on domestic issues, however, she is downright Gaian in matters of foreign policy, reserving her greatest scorn for the humans who left the planet and now plan to defoliate it in a Vietnam-style armageddon called Project Deep Green. The star-men are uniformly depicted as vainglorious jerks, their cold-bloodedness matched only by their stupidity (even the sole convert to the green cause, the sublimely-named Ferrer Burgoyne, is a dim bulb and a whiner). The humans' complete apathy toward the thriving biosphere that has grown in their absence faintly echoes another Vietnam allegory, Ursula Leguin's The Word for World is Forest.
Nevertheless, EIT's plot ultimately pales next to its amazing style and atmosphere--a melange of fairy tale imagination, tough-talking dialogue, and zestfully described gross-outs (imagine a combination of Tolkien, Dashiell Hammett, and the Three Stooges)--that deserves to be called "Piserchiesque," so unique is it to the author. In this teeming, slithery milieu of ornads, snapes, budgers, frallops, and cremonts, of creatures "fat, heavy, cumbersome, vividly colored, winged or not, multi-legged, multi-eyed, [with] skin like steel leather or leathery steel," characters are beaten, shorn of limbs, knocked off high branches, and flung forcible into space, while the bubonic horrors Peru inflicts on his victims are described in baroque, sickening detail.
The sheer anarchic vitality of this universe suggests a more recent conception of feminism, challenging the separatist or unisex models--specifically, the will-to-chaos and "derangement" of masculine logic described by post-modernist theorist Luce Irigary. Yet even the most hardened po-mo critic might be perplexed by passages where the wise-guy narrative voice comes to a halt and the novel takes on a magical, children's book tone, as when Piserchia describes the suborbital battles of Whing and his rival steeple sentries, Quell, Talion, and Scrate. These gigantic creatures periodically bellow out at each other from their homes atop needle-like towers (remnants of geosynchronous elevators stretching from the jungle floor to outer space), then fly into the vacuum to do combat, a charming, seemingly pointless plot diversion that ends up having a major impact on the storyline.
Piserchia has been criticized for being "coy"
in her use of fantasy,
but her pastiches of sf, surrealism, and kid's
stories restore a sense
of animistic wonder to a genre that is all too
often strangled by its need
to tie everything together. Even an old sf hand
like Aldiss is guilty of
forsaking science for a good image--Hothouse's
cobwebs strung between
earth and a stationary moon come to mind. It
seems unfair to criticize
her for violating the conventions of one genre
when she's quite possibly
inventing another: pagan tales of quarreling,
philandering deities, updated
for an age of space travel and genetic
manipulation.
One of Doris Piserchia's great talents as an author is describing a community going to hell: the crime-ridden Gotham in Mr. Justice, the flooding factory in I, Zombie, the cities assaulted by aliens in A Billion Days of Earth, The Fluger, and The Spinner. Blood County, a reworking of the vampire story as a kind of Southern Gothic, action/suspense thriller, chronicles the violent and traumatic breakdown of an Appalachian village that's been politically stable for centuries. Or perhaps living on a knife-edge would be a better term.
Deep in the backwoods of West Virginia, the town of Blood has thrived in obscurity, largely cut off from the rest of the U.S. One reason for its stability is its unique form of government: not only does it have a feudal barony, it's had the same baron running the place since 1693. The novel documents the chaotic period between the fall of this leader, a night-dwelling emigré from the Old Country named Duquieu Lamprou, and the rise of a new one. The story is upbeat in that, in the scramble for power after his death, his good heir triumphs over his bad one, but it is downbeat in that a sick political system--one that drains the blood of the common people, literally--is preserved. The reader is left with the certainty that the good heir, noble as he is, is doomed to be just as bad as the father.
Yet is that necessarily bad, on balance? As we learn, Blood residents have a rather strange notion of Jeffersonian "consent of the governed."
Checks and balances. Duquieu is a Lamprou by name (it's his Greek surname) and also by nature. The word "vampire" isn't used in the novel; rather, the author envisions a breed of superhumans possessed of long life and regenerative powers, with a moniker and eating habits recalling the famous lake-dwelling eel's. Duquieu can pass his advanced physical attributes to people by biting and infecting them with "Lamprou substances"; as with folkloric vampirism, death triggers the change, which takes about a day. Duquieu's "heirs" are created by more intimate means of fluid exchange. After he rapes and impregnates a couple of village women, they give birth to "full-blooded Lamprous," Clinton and Jared. Born a few days apart and adopted by local men (curiously, both alcoholics), the boys grow up like brothers, but only Jared, who bears the "mark of Duquieu" (a birthmark, never precisely described) knows for certain he's a Lamprou.
One of the locals describes Duquieu as a "civilized thing," and for an ancient enemy of humankind he goes to extraordinary--and one might say extraordinarily fastidious--lengths to protect his subjects from himself and his kind. He shields the villagers from famine by giving them hybrid seeds of his own invention, which they use to grow giant, life-sustaining crops. He encourages their superstitious belief that his presence in the mansion above the town is required to "bless the fields" and provide continued agricultural bounty. Instead of feeding on them directly, he appoints a villager to make a circuit of the community, collecting blood with syringes and storing it in bottles. Every resident must make a donation but no single person has to give more than once a month--just like the Red Cross!
Despite these measures, Duquieu's appetites for food and sex can't be completely controlled, as the births of Clinton and Jared demonstrate. Everyone in the village understands that a child or virgin wandering under the full moon is fair game, but once bitten, the new Lamprou becomes an infection-spreading threat to the community. Thus, Duquieu builds several barred, reinforced concrete bunkers called "havens." When more Lamprous roam the countryside than he can deal with, he orders the townspeople to hide in these structures until the predators can be rounded up and killed (with "wood swords" through the heart). And in case anyone is thinking of seeking revenge for a lost loved one, he protects himself in the daytime by sleeping in an impregnable iron cage.
Heaven or hell? Perpetually fearing not only your leader but your neighbors is rough; one resident of Blood describes it as "living in Beelzebub's circus." Yet at the same time, throughout the book, the author depicts the town as a pre-industrial paradise, where people live close to nature, give each other plenty of space, and greet each other with polite "haddoos." As DP suggests in her forward, she based the story on her memories of growing up as a child in West Virginia, and the reader finds the novel suffused with nostalgia for this simpler world. In contrast to the busy urban environment, sensory impressions and emotions are stronger in Blood. The woods are green and abundant; the air is pure; smells are richer. Food tastes better because it is better. People form stronger and more meaningful bonds than in the city.
Most of the characters in the novel are so entranced by the friendly side of Blood that they blind themselves to its dangers: they calmly go about their business when they should be running down the mountainside screaming. The main protagonist, Clint Breen, did flee the town for nine years. He became a mature Lamprou after dying in the (Vietnam?) war, but, still being able to pass for human, hid his true nature as he went to college and eventually became a schoolteacher in Newark. (Interestingly, DP also got teaching credentials after leaving her home town of Fairmont, and eventually settled in the Northeast.) Clint returns reluctantly to Blood when his half-brother Jared dies from a gunshot wound. At the beginning of the book, he agrees to come back only to help protect the town, since the angry and ambitious Jared is likely to reawaken as a particularly vicious Lamprou. But by the middle of the story, as his own Lamprou tendencies are becoming more and more pronounced, he announces to his adopted father, a local named Sugie, that Blood is "home to everybody I love."
More puzzling is newcomer Portia Clark's affection for the town. This New Jersey resident, a freelance writer and former Olympic archer, follows Clint to Blood out of romantic curiosity, but ends up also falling in love with his boyhood home. It's mainly through her point of view that we see Blood's good side, as she makes mental notes for an article-to-be on a village that has, apparently, quietly seceded from the Union. By the end of the book, the town's rustic charm and "strange polite people" so entrance her that she wonders if there's anything for her to return to in Newark. Mind you, this is after she's killed two Lamprous with a bow and arrow and been threatened by more. Portia is the "Haircut" character--referring to the barber in the Ring Lardner short story, who regales everyone with tales of a swell local guy who is clearly an S.O.B. She's also the girl in the slasher film who walks alone into the woods to investigate a strange noise. She knows Blood has a subclass of residents with pale skin, dark-ringed eyes and a distressingly furtive manner, but she tells herself they must be incest victims.
Most conspicuously in denial are the townspeople themselves. Who would choose to live with the boogeyman as your leader, year after year? Well, ask the North Koreans or the Iraqis. Yet bad as those countries' despots may be, at least they don't turn their subjects' nearest and dearest into murdering animals. A populace that fails to rise in revolt against such conditions (or flee en masse) would seem lamentably weak; by the end of the novel, it's clear it's even worse than that: they're actually doing this by choice. When Duquieu dies, the only future the townspeople can imagine is to get another Lamprou in power as quickly as possible. At first they think it's going to be Jared, which is worrisome, since he's obviously more bloodthirsty than his father. When they learn Clint is a Lamprou, they're even more delighted at the thought of having him as a successor.
The novel hints that superstition keeps Blood servile under such extreme conditions, but ultimately it's just laziness. As one of the townspeople tells Clint, if Jared gets out of control they'll "open up his heart with a wood sword," and that's essentially what they do. The residents don't mind having a monster in power, as long as someone else runs things; they'll kill a bad leader but they won't lead themselves. Piserchia surely means the book as an indictment of the Appalachia she fled: for all the glowing talk about its manners and mores, there are hints that things aren't so sanguine, pun intended. In one passage, Duquieu confirms that the town has its own brand of "gargoyles": monsters who result from inbreeding rather than vampirism. He also claims that the locals burned down two schools he built, because they wanted only "their fields and their jugs and their isolation." Neither Clint nor anyone else refutes this alarming charge.
Affairs of the (skewered) heart. The blindness of the villagers to the reality of the town also seems to cloud their vision of each other as individuals; it's hard to find a bigger roster of tragically oblivious people outside of Shakespeare. Clint's childhood bond to Jared prevents him from seeing how monstrous his half-brother has become. Villager Louise Steiner allows her young son to "nurse" from her bloodstream after his transformation, until she drops dead. Clint's surrogate father Sugie ignores all the obvious signs that his adopted son is no longer human. Clint's childhood sweetheart Coley, who married Jared after Clint went away, continues to believe that Clint will come back to her after Jared has "died." Talk about misplaced affection: at the end of the book, the townspeople confess that they had to choose between saving Coley and Portia from Jared's deadly attentions, and selected the latter. Clint, who has just rammed a stake through Coley's heart to save her from eternal damnation, rather too coolly says, "You saved the right one."
In deepest denial is Duquieu himself. He is a monster but not without his sympathetic, tragic side. His protection of the villagers is motivated by the need to survive, of course: if he killed them all off he'd have to expand his territory, and he's already been chased off one continent--but there's a certain noblesse oblige in his attempt to build schools (assuming that's true) and in the touching gesture of allowing villagers to draw their own blood. As he ages, however, his self-control is breaking down. Years before coming to Blood he married a mortal woman named Gilda, again with the best of intentions, but by the time the reader encounters her she's been bitten and transformed. She is now a pale, scrawny hag who surreptitiously feeds on the locals, yet Duquieu still loves her and looks to her for emotional support.
Hee Haw with Fangs. In discussing Blood County's politics and personae, so far I've failed to mention that the book brims with humor, of the mordant and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny kind. Piserchia exploits the humorous as well as horrific possibilities of a backwoods setting where anyone is likely to turn Lamprou at any moment. She never condescends to her characters--the humor is entirely within the story's own terms--and her ear for upcountry dialogue is perfect. A frequent threat made by villagers who've recently undergone transformation is that they're going to "dreen" someone--as in "I'm going to dreen your veins." When Senior Ricco, a grizzled old farmer, turns, he begins stalking his son Junior, who made him work the fields while in his dotage: "He wasn't all that fine a son and I feel I owe him, " Senior says. "He used to kick my tail blue." There is a funny scene where Lamprou Swen Anderson's heart is knicked by a villager's arrow. Hobbling about in extreme pain, he seeks out Sid Mead, the general store manager who doubles as the town doctor. Through the bars of a haven, these two sly hayseeds negotiate how Sid is going to treat Swen without Swen dreening him--a scene straight out of the Andy Griffith Show, with the potential to erupt in bloody mayhem.
And erupt the book does, on many occasions. From a few indiscreet nibbles a Lamprou army slowly begins to grow, as one unsuspecting townsperson after another is bitten by a former friend or lover. Two-thirds of the way through finds most of the population hunkered down in the havens, per Duquieu's orders--but then even these supposedly safe places come under attack by the determined Lamprous. The expected confrontation between Clint and his father never occurs; instead Duquieu inadvisably rapes women's libber Portia and she dispatches him then and there with a pine arrow through the ticker. Meanwhile, Clint pursues the newly awakened Jared, his "foaming hound" of a brother, and it's eventually the two of them, rather than father and son, who have the big masculine competition.
Blood County is a ripping yarn that thrills and keeps readers guessing as the author reveals one facet after another of her clever rethinking of the vampire myth. The action is nonstop, with none of the florid passages bogging down Anne Rice novels--as vampire Faulkner it's closer to the lurid pulp of Sanctuary than the lofty experimentalism of The Sound and the Fury--as well as memorably spooky images: the face of a recently dead woman pressed against a screen door, staring into a dark room where the living are sleeping; a five year old vampire nipping at the legs of an old drunk until he's dreened. The book implicitly condemns Appalachian provincialism, and unhealthy political systems the world over, but also carries a hefty emotional tug, since the author is semi-autobiographically revisiting the world of her girlhood. It's a bit sad that she's telling a tale, near the end of her writing career, of a smart man who leaves the sick, hick town of his birth, to start a new life in the big city (as Piserchia did), only be drawn back there till the end of time. Woven in with all the fun and mayhem is a subtle statement, perhaps, on the difficulties of transcending roots and class in America: think It's a Wonderful Life with a bloodsucking George Bailey doomed to make the best of his own hillbilly Bedford Falls.
--T. M.
The
Deadly Sky: Subtle
invasion of a complacent future city.
This 1983 Piserchia novel, the last one published, is rare in that the protagonist is (gasp!) male. Ashlin is alienated from his overcivilized, overmechanized city, and his scientist father who is a pillar of the community. He finds solace in rock climbing and discovers a strange colony high in the peaks, and large birds with saddle-shaped depressions in their backs, just right for hosting human behinds. The colony's aim is to fight the aliens who have opened a crack into our space and are trying to bust through. How far their infiltration has penetrated is up to the hero to discover. Most notable is the "machine" that the aliens have built--a sort of skeletal building, trapped with randomly falling knives that make amputees and eventually cyborgs out of much of the populace. The falling knives bring to mind the Nome King's booby-trapped rooms from Rinkitink in Oz, by L.Frank Baum. The hero's ability to sense danger reminds me of Bink from Piers Anthony's "Xanth" series. All in all, a good, quasi-creepy novel, and a challenge to the reader who likes to know about the character's relationships. Trying to find out the hero's psyche is like finding a silent runaway child in the old-time London fog. You almost think you know what's up...then you don't...
--J. P.