The Fluger by Doris Piserchia
~The Quick Review~
The Fluger exceeds expectations as a classic monster novel, but it never sustains excellence long enough to make the book as a whole feel valid. Still, if you approach the book as it is—a quick, pulpy romp—there is enough here to make it worth a read—if quick, pulpy romps are your thing.
~The Real Review~
I didn’t expect to like The Fluger. Hell, I didn’t even expect to finish The Fluger. Based on my last Doris Piserchia book, I expected to read 10ish pages and turn it into a review by the next day
I am thrilled to be wrong.
The fluger, an alien of supreme antipathy, ends up on future earth and begins to lay waste to Olympus—the new New York City. Unfortunately, the Mayor has more than just the fluger to worry about—his predecessor, recently dead, had hired an alien assassin named Kam Shar to deal with the fluger. The problem? Kam Shar won’t abide anyone’s authority, and he won’t leave until he’s finished the job.
Now, with that summary and the knowledge that the book is only 159 pages long, you should have a decent idea of what to expect: it’s fast-paced, world-building is ad hoc and often incomprehensible, characters are a little lean, and action takes center stage at the expense of a lot of other things. There’s also a fair amount of gore—the fluger is always tearing people in half and eating their entrails or swiping someone’s face off their skull. These moments aren’t drawn out in grotesque detail, but it does happen a lot, and occasionally with enough gusto to make me feel a little squicky.
Perhaps what you wouldn’t expect—I certainly didn’t—is that the fluger isn’t mindless. He’s an intelligent creature from a harsh planet where destruction is both societal and instinctual, and a decent amount of time is dedicated to explaining exactly how he works. Sometimes it feels a little goofy, but on average I think it elevates what could otherwise be flat.
On the flip side of the fluger, we have Hulian. A boy from the slums outside of Olympus, he’s clever and earnest and good-hearted and is foolishly hell-bent on revenge after the fluger kills his caretaker. He is, unfortunately, not as well developed as the fluger, and yet I really liked him. It wasn’t just that he made unexpected, loyal friendships (something that I will always love), it’s that he looked at the world differently than everyone else, and that helped give the story a touch of humanity.
Take, for example, Hulian losing an eye to a fluger attack. He’s able to have it replaced, but his new eye is blue—his old eye is brown. Hulian is Black.
An old white guy, none too friendly, corners Hulian and is trying to get him to cooperate. When Hulian refuses, the guy says “Hey, if you help, I’ll make your eyes match again. I can get you another blue eye. You’ll look mighty handsome.”
Hulian wonders “why does he assume I’d want blue eyes rather than brown ones?”
Don’t get me wrong. The Fluger is a piece of absurd pulp. It’s not questioning the world at length or spending much time challenging bias. The fact that it does, though, even just a little, helped breathe life into the world.
There were plenty of hopelessly depressing and realistic moments. Take the mayor. He tries to exert some authority over Kam Shar because of personal insecurities. Kam Shar don’t play that way, and leaves.
Naturally, the Mayor redistributes his people to hunt Kam Shar.
Mind you, Kam Shar has done nothing wrong, nor has he given any indication of doing anything dicey. The fluger, on the other hand, has killed hundreds or thousands of people and is still an unchecked threat. Kam Shar shouldn’t be the mayor’s focal point right now. If anything, Kam Shar is their best chance at actually defeating the seemingly invincible fluger. But no. The mayor wants to take out Kam Shar.
Like, how typical is it that a leader would let people die just because he felt disrespected…
See also: the city is locked down because of the rampaging fluger. The fluger loves destruction and is drawn to groups of people. So, what do the citizens do? They gather in a public space to protest not being allowed to leave.
Just like in the real world, it does not end well.
Then there were scenes that were depressing because they were not realistic.
The fluger is headed toward the children’s quarters. Everyone knows that the fluger cannot be stopped, but countless people pile into the boulevard just to slow it down. They do, eventually, come up with a faint plan, and for the first time they manage to flap the previously unflappable fluger. It is a strong scene with some undertones about how bravery and banding together can turn even insurmountable tides … but given today’s climate the scene also seemed false. We can’t get people to stay home to save lives—I can’t imagine thousands and thousands of people lining up in front of a beast they know they can’t hurt, just hoping the time it takes the beast to kill and maybe eat them will buy children some time to escape.
I was feeling some feels, mostly along the lines of “we should be better than this,” but I think Doris Piserchia either anticipated this or felt some of those feels herself.
In one scene, a bunch of people are evacuated to an old, now slum, city, to escape the fluger.
“The town was ancient and dilapidated, dirty and somehow hollow looking. Its empty windows were mouths that told of past glories. Nobody on the plane would have believed any of those stories. The passengers were from the future, which for some reason had always been painted brighter than the present or the past”
This paragraph stood out to me so perfectly. She’s right—the present does feel like ‘the future,’ and there is this weird, underlying feeling that just because it’s the future, things are supposed to be “better.
Because I’m a grown-ass woman who still listens to folk-punk made by high-schoolers, it reminded me of the lyrics from Michael Jordan Touchdown Pass’s ‘So Called Enemies’: “I’ve got it—you’ve got it, this unexplained notion, that something good will happen if we just stay the course.”
It feels weird to say that realizing that the expectation that things will get better over time is probably not realistic made me feel better, but it did. If I expect that time will magically make people, on average, less selfish, then dear cod one look at the news—or reviews for the local coffee shop that recently reiterated that customers need to wear face masks—would make me feel like things are irrevocably broken.
But they’re not. There have always been shitty, selfish, terrible people, just as there have always been good, caring, selfless people. Time doesn’t make one group more prevalent than the other. I just need to make sure I stay in my lane.
It’s a little off-topic, but that revelation is what I love about reading bizarre novels. One paragraph in the middle of a monster novel and I’m looking at the world a little differently.
Okay, but back to the book. Considering how … rough The Dimensioneers was, the often beautiful prose of The Fluger surprised me. The above paragraph about the slum city is a good example.
“Its empty windows were mouths that told of past glories.”
Dude, it’s just perfect. I can see it in my mind, and it makes me feels something. A sentence cannot do better than that.
There are plenty more, but I read a lot of The Fluger in the bath, so jotting them down was inconvenient, and I prefer to leave some gems to the novel so that if anyone should decide to read it, they have something unexpected to savor.
Now onto the caveats of my surprisingly positive review.
I loved Hulian and his relationship(s), but they’re not nuanced or particularly developed. The focus is on the fluger—I just happen to find the growth of Hulian’s relationships to be delightful.
The writing is gorgeous sometimes—other times it’s inscrutable. The city of Olympus is described as a bunch of stacks of 0s and, frankly, I still don’t understand what that means. The infrastructure of the city matters a surprising amount as the fluger demolishes support beams and whatnot, and I just rolled with these moments the best I could considering I couldn’t get a clear image of the city in my head.
There are plot holes—dear cod are there plot holes. Action-style stories like this, though, tend to have plot holes, so it shouldn’t be too surprising.
I did not like the ending. To me, it felt like there should be another page after it. I know that Hulian et al haven’t been too sincerely developed, but there was some growth and connection there, and ending the book without even winking at the future for these characters felt odd and disappointing.
In summary, I can’t generally recommend The Fluger—while it has good moments, it never sustains that energy long enough—but at the same time, I’m glad I read it, and I could see other people having the same reaction to it.
Cover art by H.R. Van Dongen:
