Doris Piserchia Weblog


Weblog Archive.

The Doris Piserchia Website.

Digital Media Tree (or click "home" below).

The Doris Piserchia Weblog.

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



Here is the new last paragraph of the Blood County review (still fiddling with this):
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.

- tom moody 3-08-2004 3:11 am [link]