Customer Reviews

The Deadly Sky (Daw UE1792)

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This Piserchia novel is rare in that the protagonist is (gasp!) male. The young man, whose name as usual escapes me, is alienated from his overcivilized, overmechanized city, and his scientist father who is a pillar of the community. He finds solace in rock climbing and discovers a strange colony high in the peaks, and large birds with saddle-shaped depressions in their backs, just right for hosting a human behind. The colony's aim is to fight the aliens who have opened a crack into our space and are trying to bust through. How far their infiltration has penetrated is up to the hero to discover. Most notable is the "machine" that the aliens have built - a sort of skeletal building, trapped with randomly falling knives that make amputees and eventually cyborgs out of much of the populace. The falling knives bring to mind the Nome King's booby-trapped rooms, from _Rinkitink_in_Oz_, by L.Frank Baum. The hero's ability to sense danger reminds me of Bink from Piers Anthony's _Xanth_ series. All in all, a good, quasi-creepy novel, and a challenge to the reader who likes to know about the character's relationships to others. Trying to find out the hero's psyche is like finding a silent runaway child in the old-time London fog. You almost think you know what's up...then you don't...

DEADLY SKY, Doris Piserchia's last published novel, tells of a black, pulsating crack that hangs in the sky above a sleepy city of glass, visible only to a psychically gifted minority. Ashlin, a young man with a talent for creating bizarre devices that work a lot better than they should, belongs to this demographic. His fascination with gigantic mountain birds and affection for a strange, beautiful girl ultimately lead him to join an organization that has been waging a secret war to close the crack for many years.

I'm nuts about this stuff. Go on and get it! It's not like you don't have three bucks.