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.
View current page
...more recent posts
Early vs Late Books
I’ve been thinking about DP’s short stories, and her responses to our interview questions and wanted to
jot down a few ideas. DP says she prefers the
short stories to the novels and prefers the early
novels (Star Rider, Billion Years) to the later
ones. I’m inclined to agree about the short
stories--they’re really amazing (more on them later)--but I’m not so sure the early books are necessarily the best.
For DP, quality is a matter of “balance,” and the
short stories have that in abundance. They are tightly
constructed, and deliver emotional wallops. The early novels
are close to them in intensity but also in
style--philosophical, discursive, sprinkled with mock-Socratic
dialogues. I like the later books because they "show" rather
than "tell": DP plunges you right into their worlds
and lets the setting and action make her points (I
became especially aware of this when I was looking for
quotes from Earth in Twilight--there are few
stand-alone speeches, it’s all in the flow of events). I was
fascinated to learn that the later novels were written in a
headlong rush and that DP subsequently couldn’t summon the
enthusiasm to revise them. I think that’s the source of
their power. They feel as if they were born out of some
inner necessity that drives the author to invent like
mad. I started reading DP back in the ‘80s because she
reminded me of Philip Dick during his most creative period
(early to mid 1960s): staying up all night, working on
the deadline from hell, writing novels that were, on
some level, just “one damn thing after another,” but
authentically visionary. Like Dick (minus the drugs) and H. P.
Lovecraft (minus the hypersensitive reclusiveness), DP
truly “takes you to another place,” which turns out to
be (shudder) a lot like the place we’re all living
in. (It's also a subtly feminine place, which I find
hard to talk about without overgeneralizing--please
help me out here!) I suppose DP could have tightened
up Doomtime or Earthchild to make them less a
series of episodes, but I’m glad she didn’t; Doomtime,
for instance, might have lost that dreamlike quality
of morphing from sf scenario to druidical fantasy to
Edith Hamilton mythology to pungent social satire (not
necessarily in that order). And other late books don’t need
any tweaking at all: The Spinner and Blood County
strike me as very well organized. More on the short
stories in a later post.