6/10/26
The brain fog has been nuts recently. Had a conversation over the weekend with a publisher who expressed interest in doing a chapbook with me, but couldn’t remember who it was, and ultimately had to resort to asking online last night.
Then, this morning, I waas going to go have a cup of coffee with my ex-wife, and as I was pulling in, she texted to remind me that she had an appointment this morning. So the whole drive was for nothing, or so I thought. But then on the way home I came across a tiny black and white kitten just sitting in the middle of the road. It was about five or six weeks old, tops. Young enough to still be docile and unafraid, and still had some of the blue in its eyes that newborn kittens have. Had i not stopped it would have been run over by the next vehicle. I quickly figured out that it had come from a farm sitting back from the road — I spotted one of its littermates watching with curiosity, and a feral momma slinking off around the side of the barn. I walked the kitten over to the barn, sat it down next to its sibling, and told it that I didn’t want to catch it sitting out in the road again. It looked up at me with some amusement, and then wandered off to investigate a bird.
Sometimes, the universe puts you where you’re needed. I just wish it didn’t do so with brain fog.
~
Women In Horror Year: Day 54
The Spinner by Doris Piserchia
The search for new sources of energy led one man to an accidental breakthrough into a strange parallel world. It was apparently deserted and might have been a good place to prospect until the finder panicked. He tried to shut the dimensional crack that led into that other place. But the breakthrough had prematurely awakened that world's most predatory inhabitant from hibernation - and in raging fury THE SPINNER slipped through to find itself alone and hungry in an American city loaded with good things to eat - people!
I first read The Spinner in 1980, recieving a copy in the mail from The Science Fiction Book Club. And while it does indeed have the trappings of science fiction (taking place in a then-near-future Earth with some technological advances that had not yet happened and still haven’t happened) it is decidedly a horror novel. Here’s the old vintage cover to that edition.
The Spinner was one of my perennial favorites as a teen — a gruesome, genre-bending monster mash with a man-eating alien and a dystopian future that mirrored the worlds of Escape From New York and 1990: The Bronx Warriors, and some gloriously written passages and descriptions. I still own this edition and still reread it every few years. The story is simple — a corporation using an illegal transdimensional drill wake up an alien known as Mordak (the Spinner of the title) while prospecting for new energy sources and accidentally trap him on Earth, specifically in a slum-city that makes Judge Dredd’s Mega City One seem like a nice suburban neighborhood. When Mordak begins spinning webs to trap and eat humans, he fits right in with the cannibals, mutants, and roving packs of gangs who also call the city home. But eventually, the body count and chaos get big enough that the authorities have to get involved, and Piserchia does a fine job of executing the mind-numbing, banal stupidity and casual thoughtlessness that sooner or later embodies all the powers that be.
Sure to appeal to readers of Robert R. McCammon’s Stinger or to fans of Stephen Kozeniewski, The Spinner is available in eBook from Gateway. The DAW mass market paperback and the Science Fiction Book Club hardcover are both readily available on the secondary market for less than ten bucks. A fun read and an important part of my own writing DNA.
