ChadGayle reviewed Deadly Sky by Doris Piserchia
Review of 'Deadly Sky' on 'Goodreads'
1 star
The Deadly Sky is the last novel Doris Piserchia published. By 1983, her daughter had died and she'd become her granddaughter's guardian, and the commitments of raising her granddaughter kept her from ever publishing anything again. Unfortunately, this book shows none of the idiosyncratic talent Piserchia displayed in her earlier work. Maybe that's because she was drafting it in the midst of the family tragedy that upended her career; maybe it was finished but was never revised. My copy contains both typesetting and proofing errors, so there is a good chance that it was rushed to press or given the brush off as the final piece of a contract that wouldn't be renewed.
I don't hand out one star reviews unless I have to, but this novel is so flawed and so disappointing in so many respects that giving it anything more than one star would be gravely disingenuous, which …
The Deadly Sky is the last novel Doris Piserchia published. By 1983, her daughter had died and she'd become her granddaughter's guardian, and the commitments of raising her granddaughter kept her from ever publishing anything again. Unfortunately, this book shows none of the idiosyncratic talent Piserchia displayed in her earlier work. Maybe that's because she was drafting it in the midst of the family tragedy that upended her career; maybe it was finished but was never revised. My copy contains both typesetting and proofing errors, so there is a good chance that it was rushed to press or given the brush off as the final piece of a contract that wouldn't be renewed.
I don't hand out one star reviews unless I have to, but this novel is so flawed and so disappointing in so many respects that giving it anything more than one star would be gravely disingenuous, which is an awful shame. Piserchia's The Dimensioneers (1982) is by no means a classic, but it has enough going for it to make its quirkiness worthwhile; in contrast, The Deadly Sky really has nothing to recommend it. It's a poorly contrived mishmash of science fiction elements that serve a weak, one dimensional plot, written in drab, uninspired prose, and the characters are essentially clones of each other. While I was reading it, I hoped that I could find something nice to say about it by the time I was finished, but the only thing worth remembering about The Deadly Sky is the cover art by Frank Kelly Freas.
But the cover IS cool. That's something, right?