Doris Piserchia Weblog


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The following posts include (1) "footnotes" for The Doris Piserchia Website (link at left), (2) texts-in-process that will eventually appear there, (3) texts from other websites, and (we hope) (4) stimulating discussion threads. The picture to the left is the back cover of The Spinner (book club edition), depicting a citizen of Eastland "hanging out" while Ekler the cop and Rune the idiot-superman look on.


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The Spinner, 1980

Another study of humans under pressure. Society breaks down under the threat of the alien monster--as good as reading about accounts of the Great Plague, if you like that sort of thing.

Mordak, a nasty, web-spinning, invulnerable creature, threatens a large city in our not too distant future. He accidentally comes through a rift in space created by a new mining tool called the Rumson Bore. Another monster who manages to be charming even as he is dribbling gobbets of human flesh out of his fanged mouth. You know he's laughing at the pathetic scurrying of the humans. Fit prey for his young, when they hatch!

Meanwhile a bunch of wraithlike old people are living in a system of caves underneath the city. Most of them seem to have escaped from a horribly oppressive nursing home. Numerous other characters are sketched out, very quickly, but in depth; they are destined to either die rather pointlessly or to help in the great escape from the webbed-in city.

I wouldn't say that there's anything particularly "feminist" about Spinner, though it can provide fine material for a feminist slanted reading. Everyone is equally loathsome, which in my book is perfectly feminist and more realistic than the Mary Daly "cult of natural womanhood".

The picture of Rumson and his girlfriend Olivia was incredibly amusing to me. Rumson, an archetypal mad scientist with a bad case of agoraphobia, is a figure of pity here. Piserchia has something to say here about scientists who are out of touch with the world, who never know or particularly care what effects their inventions will have on society. His head is in the sand 100 percent, though you feel sorry for him even after his ultimate treatment of Olivia.

Olivia gets pretty much equally claustrophobic hanging out in Rumson's closet-like, windowless home. She comes and goes as she pleases; she has a job in some distant city. But then he drops valium in her coffee, ostensibly to save her from being caught in the web. Again the picture of a wife being drugged into complacency with her lot. It makes me wonder what Seconal or Valium horrors lie in Piserchia's past; maybe she saw this sort of thing happen to her friends. Anyway, the amusing part (but I'm pretty sick) is when Olivia stuffs his corpse in the deep freeze. She's only slightly disturbed later when she opens the freezer, days later. . . to find that maybe he hadn't been dead after all. Somehow it still makes me giggle. She barely gives it a thought. How horrid!

--Liz Henry, 1995, from Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Utopia.

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- tom moody 3-10-2002 5:20 am [link] [1 ref]