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If you write a so-called realistic novel in America--whether it's about the mores of upper-middle-class Connecticut WASPs or growing up in the 'hood in Detroit--your book will be marketed as "fiction" or "literature" and it will never have to "transcend genre." If your aim is satirical allegory, depicting present reality through the distorting lens of the fantastic, you will likely be consigned to the "horror" or "science fiction" fields, literary ghettos that are hard to escape. Gradually the writings of authors such as Philip Dick and J. G. Ballard, which endured years of "peeled eyeball" covers and incomprehension by would-be escapists and lit profs alike, are coming to be recognized as some of the most important writing of the last century. Their books aren't just about "people," in the old 18th Century novel sense, but how a technologically-transformed environment is changing people. Not every writer is lucky enough to get out of the pulp graveyard, however. Doris Piserchia's writing of the '70s and early '80s took a hard look at life in America during that period, just as Dick's did in the '50s and '60s, and reflected it back disguised as "harmless fantasy." Some of her books were more escapist than others--at least four of them seem squarely aimed at brainy teenage girls--but that was a necessity of working in the marketplace, and even those books are full of weird, subversive elements.
As someone who wants to see Piserchia's work survive and be discussed seriously, then, it's with some trepidation that I present the latest additions the The Doris Piserchia Website: the book cover gallery for 1973-77 and the book cover gallery for 1978-83. Here's a slice of marketing from the Great American kitsch factory guaranteed to send Connecticut WASP-fanciers screaming for the exits. But despite their potentially marginalizing influence, there's a lot to be said for these dumb covers--particularly the ones painted by H. R. Van Dongen, whose old school/modern sensibility is strangely matched to Piserchia's. The other (mostly-unknown) artists who labored to find some visual equivalent to her oddball visions should be saluted, too, as torrid and dated as their efforts often are. The only truly bad covers are the later ones by Kelly Freas, which commit the unforgivable crime of making Piserchia look cornball.