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
From Joyce Carol Oates' excellent introduction to a collection of H. P. Lovecraft stories:
Readers of genre fiction, unlike readers of what we presume to call "literary fiction," assume a tacit contract between themselves and the writer: they understand that they will be manipulated, but the question is how? and when? and with what skill? and to what purpose? However plot-ridden, fantastical or absurd, populated by whatever pseudo-characters, genre fiction is always resolved, while literary fiction makes no such promises; there is no contract between reader and writer for, in theory at least, each work of literary fiction is original, and, in essence, "about" its own language; anything can happen, or, upon occasion, nothing. Genre fiction is addictive, literary fiction, unfortunately, is not.
This quote would be a good peg for an overall discussion of DP stories. To what extent does she fulfill the "contract with the reader"? To what extent does she break it?
Notes on Blood County: 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.) Strangely, there's almost no subtext (this is true of many of Piserchia's books). Yes, there is an implied condemnation of Appalachian provincialism (and unhealthy political systems the world over), and a certain emotional tug that comes from an author revisiting the world of her girlhood. But in the end what you're left with is an intricately worked-out plot, memorably spooky images (the face of a recently dead woman pressed against a screen door; a five year old vampire nipping at the legs of an old drunk until he's dreened) and a profound feeling of ambivalence about whether Blood is a glimpse of our lost, agrarian past or a backwoods hellhole that deserves to be wiped from the face of the earth.
The closest thing you'll find to a cinematic visualization of Doris Piserchia's "jungle worlds" (in Earthchild, but especially Earth in Twilight) is Hayao Miyazaki's animation epic Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. In the film's post-apocalyptic world, the Earth is gradually being overtaken by a toxic jungle called the Sea of Corruption, which is filled with towering flora and myriad exotic insect species. The beautifully-drawn scenes inside the jungle have the same chaotic density and sense of lurking danger as Piserchia's tales: swarms of hunter-killer dragonflies, tree-climbing pillbugs, and giant multi-eyed mites called Ohmu are among the many denizens of Miyazaki's ecosystem. According to this exhaustive article, Miyazaki had read Dune and Brian Aldiss's Hothouse before working on Nausicaä, but his emphasis on insects--as opposed to plant species--as the dominant lifeform in the jungle places his vision of a twilight Earth closer to Piserchia's than Aldiss's. Like Reee in Earthchild, Princess Nausicaä is surprisingly at home in her deadly environment, and communicates sympathetically with some of its most frightening creatures.
Good luck finding a copy of the film, however. It was released in the U.S. in 1984 by New World Video, in a heavily-edited cut titled Warriors of the Wind. Disney has since acquired the rights (along with Princess Mononoke and other Miyazaki films), but who knows when they'll release it. I found Warriors at my local video store, and enjoyed it thoroughly despite its mangling of the story line. I actually prefer the New World translation of the jungle as "Toxic Jungle" rather than "Sea of Corruption," although there's really no reason for changing Nausicaä to Zandra, and "Ohmu" is probably better than "Gorgons" for the giant bugs. One impediment to a Disney rerelease may be the sexuality of Nausicaä. Anime expert Susan Napier calls her "androgynous," but in the first half of the movie she's wearing a microminiskirt and apparently no underwe4r. I kept telling myself that Miyazaki was more "classy" than the typical p4nty-peeking anime director (surely the Princess is wearing flesh-colored tights!), but still found the flapping skirt distracting. I can imagine the corporate types at Disney discussing whether to digitally "dress" the Princess.
[Chapter outline of Blood County, continued from comments to the previous post. (Postscript: all this material is now consolidated and on its own page.)]
Ch. 33. Little Charlie acquires his second adult guardian since becoming a Lamprou: in place of the late Gilda and her "kisses and protecting arms," he gets Jared Brewster and the "promise of drama and mayhem." Jared coaches him in the stalking of elderly villager Senior Ricco: a humiliating attack that begins when the old man is relieving his bowels in the woods. Charlie fails to drain Ricco of blood and retreats to the safety of the river; as the old man is preparing to wade into the water and brain him with a rock, Jared comes up behind Ricco and shoves him into the stream (where he disappears over the falls). Jared then takes Charlie to the mansion to be his "lookout boy."
Ch. 34. Senior's son Junior Ricco comes to Clint's house to file a complaint to be transmitted to "Jared Lamprou," the "new master." (From this scene we infer that the "civilized" Duquieu, when he was alive, gave villagers some means for redress of grievances.) Junior alleges that his father Senior has been turned into a Lamprou, has killed Junior's wife Mary, and has left eight children without a mother. He demands compensation for the transformation and its consequences. Clint says he doubts Jared will listen. Junior says he hopes Clint can "settle Jared down" so the town will have a master and crops will continue to grow, but avows that the townspeople will kill Jared and "open up his heart with a wood sword" if he doesn't behave. [Blood has a weird form of democracy: a bloodthirsty leader serves at the sufferance of the people; the townspeople won't administer but will happily kill the administrator. Or is this just bluster?] Another interesting detail: Junior has the "Hopemont yodel," which means "he has TB and will probably end up in the clinic in Hopemont."
[summary of the remaining chapters (35-55) continues in the comments to this post--or read the completed version here.]
In the previous post I analyzed Mr. Justice so much it almost died on the examination table; at some point I'll combine those notes on plot and character with a discussion of the author's style (looking closely at some quoted passages), which I hope will restore some of the mystery and magic to the novel. In the meantime, I'm going to strap another subject onto the gurney: Blood County, 1981, a fine horror novel about which very little has been written.
As those familiar with DP's bibliography know, she wrote that book under the pseudonym "Curt Selby." This paragraph precedes the frontispiece:
Curt Selby was born and raised in a remote valley of West Virginia, and is thoroughly familiar with the life of the isolated mountain folk with whom he is kith and kin. After serving in the armed forces, Selby found work in the East Coast state where he married and makes his home. He has written and sold many novels under other signatures, but this one is drawn from his own youth and experiences.
This passage contains multiple ironies: (1) The reader thinks this is Selby's most personal book--that he finally came out from under the aliases to tell a story based on his own background. One problem: Selby doesn't exist. (2) Piserchia published eleven books under her own name, but wrote the one "drawn on her youth and experiences" under a pseudonym. (3) In this most personal of her books, the isolated mountain folk who are her kith and kin are depicted as a pack of bloodthirsty vampires.
Nevertheless, the book does contain some beautiful and affectionate writing about the world DP left behind, and in discussing the novel, I plan to succumb to the urge to look for autobiography at every turn. What follows is a chapter by chapter summary, a form of note-taking that will eventually be a review.
Chapter 1. Clinton Breen receives a telegram from home announcing that his brother Jared is dead. He's so distracted he steps off a curb and is hit by a car. The gaping, mortal wound on his head barely fazes him; by the time the driver, Portia Clark, tracks him to his apartment a few hours later it's healed. Clinton tells her he's fine and doesn't need her help. Sugarman Phelps, Clinton's alcoholic "surrogate mother and father" arrives at the apartment from Blood County, W. Va. He reiterates that Jared is dead; Clinton says: "I don't see why you have to be so afraid of him."
Chapter 2. A train travels east carrying war casualties. Somewhere around Illinois or Pennsylvania, one of the coffins springs open and a fiend with long fangs and glowing red eyes emerges. As he prepares to bite the soldier guarding the coffins, the soldier recites the Lord's Prayer, and the fiend shows dawning awareness, relaxes his grip, and jumps from the train. (In Chapter 9 we learn this scene is a flashback to Clinton's vampire awakening.)
Chapter 3. From her hiding place under a mansion in Blood County, Gilda Lamprou watches a child, Charlie, playing. She gives him bubblegum in exchange for a few drops of "what keeps him functioning," a routine that's been going on for some time. She fears her husband, Duquieu, will be "harsh" if she "simply snatches the brat and does what she longs to do all at once."
[outline continued in comments--or read the completed version here.]