Barry Lyga's Blog: The BLog, page 4

Distraction-Free Writing Gizmo!

Yes, it’s yet another one of those “distraction-free” writing gadgets. This one is a Japanese import being readied for the American market. I have complicated feelings about these sorts of things. I would never use one, but damn aren’t they cool???

Here’s The Verge on the device.

Here’s its Indigogo page.

From My Hard Drive: I Hunt Killers and…Ewoks???

Came across this in my folder stuffed full of I Hunt Killers files and realized almost none of you would have ever seen it. It’s a piece I wrote for The Big Thrill, which is the newsletter of the International Thriller Writers, a society of… You know, I bet you can guess.

Anyway, I wrote this piece on the occasion of the publication of Blood of My Blood. Enjoy!

“Watch out for the Ewoks,” my brother told me.

Let me explain.

The time: A couple of years ago. The topic: The third and final book in my thriller series I Hunt Killers, titled Blood of My Blood. The book hits shelves on September 9, but at the time of the conversation with my brother, I had just begun writing it.

“Watch out for the Ewoks.”

The I Hunt Killers series takes place very much on earth, in the present day, with nary a lightsaber, hyperdrive, Jedi, or Bantha in sight. It tells the story of Jasper “Jazz” Dent, the son of Billy Dent, the world’s most notorious serial killer, and his quest to figure out if he’s been damned by nature and by nurture to follow in his father’s footsteps. It’s gruesome, intense, and very, very down to earth.

So why was my brother exhorting me to beware the fuzzy alien critters from Return of the Jedi?

It’s my own damn fault. You see, when I wrote the second book in the series, Game, I ended it on not one, not two, but three cliffhangers, leaving all three of the major characters in serious life-or-death jeopardy: Jazz shot and left to die in a New York City storage unit. His best friend Howie bleeding out on the floor of Jazz’s own home. And Jazz’s girlfriend Connie, worst of all, in the clutches of Billy himself.

My editor was leery of Game’s cliffhangers. She was worried readers would be upset and, sure enough, when the book hit, my email inbox and Twitter timeline clogged with readers ranting, imploring, and wheedling. It was just the passionate reaction I was looking for: If readers don’t feel invested in your characters and in your story, all the cliffhangers in the world won’t get a reaction out of them.

“How could you do this to me?” they screamed at me.

And almost every time, I responded, “This is the middle part of the story. When things go bad for the heroes. It’s like The Empire Strikes Back. Luke loses a hand, Han gets frozen and carted away. Things fall apart.”

I was happy with my answer, but something lurked in the back of my mind until my brother’s chance comment brought to the fore:

“Yeah, you pulled off Empire,” he said to me when I began writing Blood of My Blood. “Watch out for the Ewoks.”

The Ewoks. Those annoying, too-adorable-by-a-half, ridiculous merchandising opportunities masking as characters from Jedi! I’d hated them as a kid seeing the movie and I hated them still.

After Empire, I waited with bated breath for years to see the resolution to the story. And George Lucas, in his eternal wisdom, fed me Ewoks.

And I wondered: Was I going to do the same? Had I given my readers a triple dose of cliffhanger fever that I would try to cure with the metaphorical equivalent of walking alien teddy bears?

Oh, God, please! No! Anything but that!

It’s one thing to set up a cliffhanger. Any idiot can do that, and I was three times the idiot at the end of Game. But now I had to not only resolve those cliffhangers, but also deliver a satisfying ending to the story as a whole.

I suddenly felt an enormous amount of sympathy for the much-maligned Mr. Lucas. Granted, the entire population of the planet isn’t waiting for Blood of My Blood the way everyone in the world waited for Jedi back in the eighties, but still. I felt a kinship with him.

Momentarily, at least. Because at the end of the day, I knew my ending. I’d conjured it years before, in the early stages of writing the first novel. I’d even written the entire epilogue while working on Game, so that I could just slot it in when I was ready. And — miracle of miracles! — that epilogue still fit when I got to it.

Knowing the ending in advance meant that I had a goal to shoot for. It meant that I’d laid out all of the paving stones — and some landmines! — for myself through the first two books. And now I only had to follow them.

Follow them I did. And now Blood of My Blood, the culmination of five years of work on my part, hits shelves and the hands of readers. I should probably be nervous, but I’m actually pretty calm. Whether the story is any good or not is, of course, up to each individual reader to decide. But I’m proud of the ending to the whole bloody mess. There’s no last-minute Death Star run, but there are betrayals and traps and twists and, yes, quite a bit of blood.

No Ewoks, though. I’m pretty damn sure of that.

(This piece comes from my newsletter, which goes out monthly. For more stuff like this, and to get it first, sign up here!)

I’m Enjoying: Song of Spider-Man

You may or may not remember the Spider-Man musical from years ago, Turn off the Dark. I saw it once in previews and then once when it had actually debuted. I am not much of a Broadway connoisseur, so I can’t speak competently to how the show compares to other musicals, but I enjoyed it for the most part, while still very much aware of its substantial flaws. Still, it’s hard to go wrong with Spidey and the Green Goblin actually flying over your head as they fight to the death.

The original writer of the beleaguered show, Glen Berger, wrote a wild memoir about his time working with director Julie Taymor and composers Bono and the Edge. If you’re at all interested in the show, it’s well worth a read!

(This piece comes from my newsletter, which goes out monthly. For more stuff like this, and to get it first, sign up here!)

Serial Killer of the Month: The Mad Biter

To be considered a serial killer, you have to kill at least three people. Look, I don’t make the rules, OK?

Richard Otto Macek — the Mad Biter — got into the club by the skin of his —

Well, no. Not gonna say that.

When I was researching I Hunt Killers, the very first book I read was My Life Among the Serial Killers, by Dr. Helen Morrison. Morrison was a psychiatrist who did some of the first early work in trying to understand serial killers, so hers was a seminal volume and really helped me get into Billy’s head. In later years, some people quibbled with her work and her conclusions, but I wasn’t writing a treatise — I was writing fiction. She was helpful in the early going as I was generating context.

She also has John Wayne Gacy’s brain in a jar in her basement. As you do.

Her writing about Macek was interesting because he was the first serial killer she encountered. Macek became obsessed with her and apparently at one point thought she was his wife. Weird.

Anyway, you can imagine why he was called the Mad Biter: Yes, dude liked to chew on the people he’d killed. He even worked his jaws on a couple of people he didn’t finish the job with.

In the end, we are aware of three deaths attributable to him (including a young child), as well as some assaults that did not end in deaths. Macek was caught, tried, and imprisoned. In 1987, he did us all a favor and hanged himself with his shoelaces.

Here’s his Wikipedia page.

(This piece comes from my newsletter, which goes out monthly. For more stuff like this, and to get it first, sign up here!)

A Book Birthday…and More Jasper Dent on the Way!

I can’t believe it! After more than ten years, the I Hunt Killers prequels are finally in print, along with a truly disturbing new story, “Ugly J and the Beautiful Day.”

Some advance readers have already posted their thoughts:

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “[the new story is] a fascinating insight on one of the most interesting characters of the series. I honestly just so thoroughly enjoyed revisiting the characters after so long and this is obviously a must read for any fan.” — Oblivionsdream on Goodreads, 5-star review

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ “it was great to be able to revisit these characters and learn more of their back stories” — Karen on Goodreads, 5-star review

“These stories are so monumentally f*cked up. And I mean that in the best possible way” — @wild_hearts_ on TikTok

“Barry Lyga does it again! A prequel worthy of I Hunt Killers, one of my all-time favorite YA thrillers!” —Kami Garcia, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Creatures and Joker/Harley: Criminal Sanity

So…what are you waiting for? Buy your copy today!

Amazon | KindleBarnes & NobleBookshop.org (to support independent bookstores!)

BUT WAIT — THERE’S MORE!

This isn’t the end — it’s only the beginning! Jasper Dent, son of Billy, is keeping the world safe from killers like his father in a whole new series.

You read that right. I have a whole new series in the works for Jazz. And as I work on writing these delightfully disturbing stories, I need your help spreading the word about why you love I Hunt Killers and the Jasper Dent world!

More news to come!

Before the Hunt Goodreads Giveaway!

Hey, there, Goodreads folks! I am giving away 10 copies of Before the Hunt…along with copies of I Hunt Killers!

 

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Giveaway ends March 21, 2025.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

You have to have a Goodreads account to enter. Check it out!

From My Newsletter: Interesting Links for You!

I don’t know quite how I feel about this story, but it sure is an interesting read: A romantasy author is accusing an agent, editor, and another author of colluding to steal her novel. This piece from the New Yorker is a great, even-handed look at the situation.A keyboard with a mechanical word-counter to track your writing? I don’t want one…but I kinda want to want one! Check it out.The California wildfires are a horror beyond imagining, and there’s damn little I can say here about them that would mean anything at all. But I found this article absolutely fascinating…and a little bit of hope in a world that sorely needs it: “Los Angeles Wildfires: Why These Homes Didn’t Burn“Apparently, design guru Karl Lagerfeld was obsessed with iPods and owned hundreds of them, each of them altered to his own standards and in his own style. Now they’re up for auction.

From My Newsletter: Non-Fiction Serial Killer Book

I completely forgot about this until recently….

Many, many years ago, at the height of I Hunt Killers, I was asked by my publisher if I would consider writing a non-fiction book about serial killers for the YA market. This seemed like an absolutely fascinating challenge to me, so we kept talking about it.

For reasons I no longer remember (I think it was mostly to do with deadlines), this project never came to fruition. But I did find on my hard drive a sample introduction I’d written for the theoretical book. I can’t remember if I ever showed this to anyone or if I just did it to see if I could. In either event, here it is!

This is a book about serial killers.

“No kidding,” you say. “It says that on the cover.”

OK, OK. Fine. But this book is a little different from other books you may have seen or read about serial killers.

For one thing, everything in this book is real. There are roughly a bajillion books out there about serial killers that are made-up (I’ve even written a couple of them), but everything in this book is true. It’s like a horror story, only it’s worse than that because everything in here actually happened to someone.

Most of the time, the people these things happened to were young. Right around your age, in some cases. Serial killers usually like easy victims, and for a grown man, a teenager or other young adult is easy pickings.

I know what you’re thinking: “Not me. If some serial killer pervert came after me, I would kick his ass so hard, he wouldn’t be able to crap for a week.”

I believe you.

But here’s the thing: Serial killers aren’t always obvious. They’re not like in the movies or on TV, where you can always tell something is “off” about them. Sometimes that happens, sure, but think about it — have you ever seen a story about a lunatic on TV and they interview the guy’s next door neighbor? Sure you have. What’s the one thing that neighbor always says?

“He was such a quiet guy.”

“I had no idea.”

“I never imagined in a million years he could do those things.”

Something like that, right?

Something like that.

Serial killers all too often look just like you and me. (Well, they look like me, at least — most of them are white guys in their thirties and forties. If you bumped into me on the street, you wouldn’t think I was planning on killing you. But I could be.) They blend in and they seem perfectly normal. Some of them seem totally helpless and harmless.

And by the time you realize they aren’t… Well, it’s too late. You’re another statistic.

So, yeah, this is a book about serial killers. We’re going to meet some of them. We’re going to try to figure out a little bit of what makes them tick. We’re going to meet the people who hunt them, and the people who study them.

But you know something?

No matter how much we do together, you and I, I don’t think we’re ever going to understand them.

Go ahead. Turn the page. There won’t be any blood.

Not for a little while, at least.

(This piece comes from my newsletter, which goes out monthly. For more stuff like this, and to get it first, sign up here!)

From My Newsletter: Stone Junction by Jim Dodge

I’m currently reading Jim Dodge’s Stone Junction, from the halcyon days of 1990. I have to be honest with you: at a hundred pages in, I’m not even 100% certain what this book is about, but it’s so gorgeously written and off-the-rails bonkers that I’m just along for the ride!

(This piece comes from my newsletter, which goes out monthly. For more stuff like this, and to get it first, sign up here!)

From My Newsletter: The Diplomat

I’m behind the times, so I just started watching 2023’s The Diplomat, a fun Netflix show from some West Wing alums about the new ambassador to Britain (played with eternal vexation by Keri Russell) and her infuriatingly awesome/awesomely infuriating husband (played with delicious aplomb by Rufus Sewell). In the current political environment, it stretches credulity a bit that all of these people are so earnest and competent, but that’s why it’s fiction, right?

(This piece comes from my newsletter, which goes out monthly. For more stuff like this, and to get it first, sign up here!)