Earth in Twilight

A non-binary tribe of tree dwellers who hide their gender from everyone, including themselves. A giant bug that thinks it’s a human and hates its spouse because she keeps laying eggs instead of giving birth to a "live boy." An "insurance salesman" whose business consists of "insuring" that various wild, mutated creatures can’t harm the individual who has taken out a "policy," but who always ends up running away from his clients. An intelligent pathogen that evolves from a semi-sentient bacterium into a biped that spreads disease far and wide....

Welcome to the world of Doris Piserchia’s Earth in Twilight.

You don’t read a Piserchia novel because you expect to find beautifully written prose or perfectly placed details. Nor do you read a Piserchia novel for its characterization, since the characters are never well drawn or thought out. You don’t even read a Piserchia novel for its plot, which will inevitably be threadbare, full of holes, or hopelessly silly.

You read a Piserchia novel because it will be weird. Damned weird. Not weird like an obscure late-night cult film you’ve heard about but never committed yourself to watching, but weird in a way that makes you wonder, seriously, whether the author was insane when she was wrote this book, whether you might be reading something that sprang from the mind of a schizophrenic.

Well, you’ll counter, Piserchia’s novels can’t be any weirder than Philip K. Dick’s, because he is the king of weirdness, the Master of the Upside Down. And there’s something to be said for the weirdness of Dick’s books, except that in every universe Dick creates, there is still a tether that connects you, the reader, to a reality that can be conceptualized. In every one of his novels, no matter how strange the premise, readers can still wrap their heads around what Dick is doing with the universe he’s created.

Not so in a Piserchia novel. Piserchia’s novels follow the dream-logic of fairy tales; reality shifts and bends and twists, and readers of Piserchia are likely to find themselves pushing back against the story because it seems to undermine the very idea of cogency and of unchanging Laws. Dive too far into the dream, and you might not come out; better to have some distance between yourself and the madness of this world of words.

Reading Piserchia isn’t unsettling because her prose suggests that reality might not be what we think it is but because it suggests that reality is a malleable thing, like a Claymation movie, where the passing of time is the only governing principle and the only thing that won’t be negated or twisted or turned around. And what’s even stranger than this is that Piserchia doesn’t seem to do it on purpose; she doesn’t write in slipstream-like prose, and she doesn’t employ clever tricks of narration to toy with the reader’s expectations or their perception of time and space. This fable-like quality isn’t a one-off effect like Anna Kavan’s gemlike Ice—it’s who Piserchia seems to be as a writer, for better or for worse.

And there are moments when it seems to be for worse. Piserchia’s novels aren’t written in a way that you can say, once you finished, that you felt some gratification in how this or that character arc was played through. Nor are there redeeming messages of morality or philosophical questions that will be posed and possibly answered, a la Philip K. Dick. The fact is, you don’t know what the takeaways are after you've read a book by Piserchia.

And that's the beauty of it, of course: the not knowing. The uncertainty. That's what makes these unreal books seem so real, because ultimately they are as confusing and as unknowable as life itself.