Barry Lyga's Blog: The BLog, page 6

100 (3)

My maternal grandmother — my Bubie — would have turned 100 yesterday. She was the first of my grandparents to pass away. That’s her holding me as a baby. I was her first grandchild and inarguably the most awesome, though she always wisely pretended that my brother and cousins were cool, too. She was smart like that.

I’ve told this story a million times in front of audiences, but I’ll tell it again now. It’s the story of how my Bubie was the first person in my life to give me shit about being a writer.

I was about seven years old. Bubie asked me — as grown-ups always do to little kids — “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I said, “I want to be a writer.”

And she smiled and looked down at me and she said, very sweetly, “Oh, that’s nice. You want to starve.”

Now, she was kidding. She was kidding, people. But of course I was all of seven and I didn’t have the sarcasm filters yet, so I thought she was totally serious and that if I grew up to be a writer that I would starve.

Clearly, though, the threat of starvation did not stop me.

I have basically two regrets in my life when it comes to Bubie. First is that she never got to meet her great-grandkids. Second is that she died before learning that I became a writer and — as my waistline will testify — have not yet starved. She would have been deliriously happy, and I would have poked fun at her over the whole starving comment, and that would have been very good.

She passed away in the spring of 2001. A few months later, when the planes hit the towers on my thirtieth birthday, the superstitious part of me whispered, “She left early because she knew the world was going to become awful.”

God, if she could see the world now, she’d be well and truly—

I was going to say horrified, but the fact of the matter is that she’d be pissed.

Women of Bubie’s generation were rock-solid and tough as nails. They had to be just to survive. They had pretty much zero rights — couldn’t buy a house or a car without a man to co-sign. Couldn’t attend most colleges. Couldn’t go to work without being harassed. Couldn’t complain about the harassment because no one cared.

So, yeah, she’d be pissed to see the hard-fought gains realized during her lifetime under threat. Bubie was sweet and kind, but she was also stone-cold when the situation demanded it. A hard-headed pragmatist who got. Things. Done.

She danced through the Great Depression, which apparently is what drew my grandfather to her. They won a lamp at a dance contest, which was a big deal back then, I guess, because they talked about it a lot.

Now, look, I loved her husband — my Zadie — dearly, but he wasn’t exactly what you’d call a Type A self-starter. He never had anything resembling a career. Bubie kept the house together. Bubie kept things moving along. Zadie was maximum chill; Bubie could relax, but in the back of her mind, you knew she was always doing the math.

So she raised three kids, mourned a fourth that would never be. Ran the household. Kept the books. Did it all with a smile and a hug.

Oh, yeah, and also tried to keep America safe for democracy. I swear this next part is true…

Sitting on the shelf to my right as I type this is a sheaf of papers from the National Archives, which I received by filing a FOIA request. See, it turns out that in the fifties, my Bubie was a spy.

I mean… Kinda.

Look, it was a weird time, OK? The Red Scare. And while lots of innocent people were hurt, the cold hard fact of the matter is that there actually were, y’know, commie spies out there! Just not as many as people thought.

So apparently Bubie was concerned about some chatter she’d been hearing in certain circles and she went to the FBI. And they were concerned, too, so they encouraged her to befriend some of these people and see what was what.

As best I can tell, nothing came of it and no one was hurt, but there’s her FBI file on my shelf. And what we get out of her time as an informant is this story…

Bubie is shopping one day at a local department store. The cashier rings her up, but neglects to give Bubie a receipt. On the way out, the security guard stops her, asks to see her receipt. Which, of course, she doesn’t have. And the cashier — out of ignorance, overwork, forgetfulness, or malice (we’ll never know) — says, “I’ve never seen this lady before.”

So Bubie is hauled into the backroom and she tells the security guy that she’s a fine, upstanding citizen who would never shoplift and, in fact, she works for the FBI…

…and then proceeds to call her FBI handler who vouches for her with the security guard and gets her off the hook!

It would be a better story, I grant you, if she’d actually stolen the stuff and used the FBI to get away with it, but ’tis not the case.

The day she died, I came home from work to a phone call from my mother, who told me Bubie was in the hospital and it didn’t look good, but don’t come because I wouldn’t get there in time anyway. I immediately hopped back in my car and hauled ass down the hilly two-laner that would eventually connect me to the highway to the hospital. I was doing ninety in a forty, thinking only of getting there in time. And a cop hit his lights behind me.

And the only thing I could think was I don’t have time for this.

So when I went over the next hill, I found the first driveway I could. I pulled in and killed my lights. The cop came up over the hill and kept going. I backed out and took off again.

(To this day, any time someone on the road cuts me off or tears past me like a bat out of hell, I think to myself, Maybe they’re not a jerk; maybe someone they love is dying.)

It didn’t matter. Mom was right. I didn’t make it in time.

It was my first real experience with death. I’d lost my great-grandparents, but they lived far enough away and I saw them so infrequently that while I missed them, they didn’t leave a hole.

Bubie’s passing ripped an enormous chasm in my life. I wasn’t sure I would ever get to the other side.

But I did. Because Bubie got me there. Because she’d been teaching me how to deal with adversity and the general stuff of life for as long as I could remember.

There are things she taught me that only became clear as lessons in retrospect. I know that one thing she didn’t teach me was to be sad. When someone I cared for was in and out of the hospital, Bubie never told me to be angry, or sad, or upset, or even mildly annoyed. She told me to be strong. “Just be strong, honey,” she would tell me, “and everything will work out.”

And it did.

“Fight nice,” she would say when I would get into an argument with my mom or my brother. It was OK to fight. It was OK to be angry. Just…be nice about it. This is your family; they’re still gonna be there when the smoke clears.

She told me to treat each day like an adventure. I can hear her: “Love a little, laugh a little, dance a little, argue a little, make love a little each day.”

And she told me to live life one day at a time, which is something I still haven’t quite mastered. I’m working on it, though, I promise. I’ll probably be working on it for the rest of my life.

But that’s all right. Because the work is what gets you through. The work is what gets you across that chasm.

I knew you’d get me there, Bubie.

From my newsletter: Bridekiller

A few of you may have seen this already…

In the very first issue of my new, rebooted newsletter, I shared a little scene from something I’m working on…a new Jasper Dent story! (If you missed it, you can get access to the archive by signing up for the low-volume newsletter here.)

Well, here is the opening scene of that book, titled Bridekiller. And yes, my agent is currently shopping it around, so please cross all your fingers and toes for Uncle Barry…

He’d fallen asleep on the sofa again and the house was as cold as Thanksgiving leftovers when the sound of the doorbell awoke Jasper Dent somewhere between eleven and noon. The cold hardly surprised him — the house had been frigid when he’d fallen asleep the night before. It had been cold all the previous day and when he’d woken that day, too. The only time the house was not cold was when the air conditioning ran in the summer. Then it was something approximating lukewarm.

He shivered his way off the sofa. The house was old and cranky, and it did not care how he set the thermostat. Its floorboards creaked; its offended stairs groaned at the slightest weight; not a single door within its confines would stay closed, so warped were the frames.

The house had belonged to his grandmother, who had willed it to him. It had little to recommend it save this: It was paid off. Jasper’s grandmother had not accomplished much in her life, but by dint of her sheer longevity, she’d managed to leave him a residence free and clear. The old Dent house stood three rickety, drunk-in-a-hurricane stories, flaking its leprous gunmetal paint in great ragged peels. It was, as his best friend Howie had once said, a house haunted by itself.

Jasper had lived there since the age of 13, shortly after his father had been arrested and put in prison. For four years, he’d tended to the house and its owner, propping up his Alzheimer’s-addled grandmother so that the world thought she was taking care of him rather than the reverse. And then she’d died and he’d inherited. A free residence and the publication of his memoir meant that, for the first time in his life, he had money.

Money could fix things. He knew the house needed serious repair at the hands of experts, but he couldn’t decide where to start. So the Dent house groaned and waffled its way into the future like an old beater patched up just long enough to get to the chop shop.

On his own, he’d tried to rejuvenate the house at least a little bit, to resuscitate its potential. The house resisted him at every turn. Everything took three times longer in the Dent house than it should have. The simple act of hanging a frame on the wall more often than not required multiple drill bits, two different stud finders, a can of spackling, and nearly inhuman forbearance.

Bulldozing it and starting over seemed the only sane avenue, but every time he decided on that path, some housebound memory would blitz attack him from the cellars of his unconscious and he would determine to renovate the old heap back to life. This was the only home he could lay claim to; he loved it and he hated it in equal measure.

The doorbell rang again as he hesitated between the living room and the kitchen. The kitchen meant coffee, and coffee meant life, but the doorbell was closer. He opened the door and immediately regretted doing so.

The woman standing on his front porch was in her mid-to-late thirties. Attractive. African-American with an elliptical face centered around a delicate button nose. She wore a deep blue Goretex coat, a tartan scarf, and sleek black gloves. Riding an explosion of tight curls, a knit cap perched jauntily atop her head, as though it had grown up there and felt quite relaxed and uninhibited. With a smile, she waggled her fingers at him.

“Hi, so my husband and I just moved into the neighborhood and we—”

As politely and as gently as one could slam a door in someone’s face, Jasper slammed the door in her face.

A quick walker, he was almost halfway down the hall to the kitchen and the promise of caffeine by the time he heard her protest, “Oh, come on! For real?”

He stopped and chuckled despite himself. “Nice try, FBI!” he shouted back through the door.

She rang the bell again and then started pounding on the door. It sounded like she was hitting it pretty hard and she went on longer than he would have thought possible. Clearly, she wasn’t going anywhere.

With a sigh, he went back to the door and leaned against it. “Go away, FBI. Not interested.”

She smacked the door one more time, an impressively powerful blow. “Five minutes of your time. That’s all.”

“Not gonna happen.”

“We checked that a moving van was seen in the neighborhood,” she said somewhat petulantly. “At least tell me what gave me away.”

“A million things.” “Humor me.”

He sighed and began ticking them off on his fingers, even though she couldn’t see him. “You’re wearing gloves, but they’re tight enough that I could tell you’re not wearing a ring. Married men often don’t wear wedding bands, but statistically married women do so overwhelmingly. Ergo, probably no husband. The car parked at the curb is the midsize rental model the Bureau likes, not an SUV or minivan that you would get when moving in somewhere and buying a bunch of new crap for your house. Your coat is puffy, but your left armpit is a little puffier than the right, so that’s where your gun is holstered. And last but not least, the FBI knows my girlfriend is Black, too, and one of their shrinks thinks maybe you’d catch me off-guard as a result.”

Silence on the other side of the door. There were more clues, more slip- ups, but he didn’t feel like elucidating further. Jasper didn’t think he was lucky enough to have driven her away with his first salvo.

Sure enough, after a moment, she spoke up. “You’re as good as they say you are.”

“And your profile has got to include that flattery is the wrong way to go with me.”

“Not trying to flatter you,” she said. “Just being honest.”

She sounded sincere and truthful and earnest, and he took a moment to remind himself that absolutely none of that mattered to him.

“It’s been fun, but now I’m going to have my coffee and you’re going to disappear back to whatever cubicle the FBI has reserved for you.”

In the kitchen, he fumbled around in the cabinets, then heaved out a sigh. His winter coat, a quilted, plaid affair that Howie said made him look like a truck driver, was on a hook near the back door. Slipping into it, he patted the pockets for his phone and wallet, then stepped into a pair of battered kicks. He almost opened the back door, then changed direction.

The FBI agent was sitting on the front stoop that led down into the yard. She wrestled a grin away from her lips before it could fully form.

“What changed your—”

“I’m out of coffee. I’ll let you buy me a cup.”

(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: Is it the Boss or the King of Horror?

Every month in my newsletter, I curate a list of fine links for your enjoyment. Stuff I found online that interested me…and I thought might also interest you.

Check it out:

I never managed to afford an Atari 5200 as a kid, much less a 7800. Now there’s a new one being put out there…and it can play your old Atari 2600 cartridges!!! I had a Flip Camera, back in the day, and recently dug it up for my kids to play with. It was a great little piece of tech for the time, but once smartphones could shoot decent video, the writing was on the wall. “The Story of the Successful Life and Abrupt Death of Flip Video Cameras”I swear, this McSweeney’s piece was written just for me!: “Bruce Springsteen or Stephen King?”Man, I love meta…and this video delivers in spades!

(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: Dishonored 2

What am I enjoying these days? Let me tell you…

I played the original Dishonored years and years ago when it first landed on Xbox 360. The story itself was a little wonky, but the gameplay mechanics were pitch-perfect and the worldbuilding/design were amazing. It was the closest I’d come to replaying my beloved Thief: Deadly Shadows in years. (Please, let us not discuss the 2014 Thief reboot…)

I never upgraded that old Xbox 360, so I couldn’t play Dishonored 2 when it came out, but I recently picked up a Fire TV stick and realized that I could stream games on it. So I’ve been playing Dishonored 2 and loving every minute of it.

Once again, the story is a little wonky (I mean really, some of it just makes no sense at all), but the mechanics are still solid and the stealth action is so so so fun!

(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: Serial Killer of the Month!

You don’t regularly see the phrase “Norwegian-American serial killer,” but when I went to Wikipedia to double-check something on Belle Gunness, that’s the description of her.

Born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth (a serial killer’s name if there ever was one!), Belle moved to the States and took up the fine old art of serial murder in Indiana. She used newspaper personals to lure men to her house, where she would kill them and take all their money. Pretty good work, if you could find it.

(Translated into 21st century: She catfished dudes on Craigslist and stole their stuff after killing them.)

I have a soft spot for Belle for a couple of reasons. First of all, I used her (sort of) in the I Hunt Killers series as both a nom de murder and a red herring. She was a very prolific female serial killer, a rare example of the breed, and thus served as at least a partial inspiration for the grotesque Crow King.

Second of all, she purportedly died in a house fire in 1908, but…they never found the body. C’mon. I’ve read enough comic books to know that this means she faked her own death and probably escaped somewhere out west…and kept killing.

That’s a scheme worthy of Billy Dent.

Here’s a good site if you’d like to learn more about Ms. Størseth.

(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: September Links for Your Enjoyment!

Every month in my newsletter (sign up!), I list some cool or funky or cool and funky links I’ve collected from around the interwebs. Check some of these out…

Fifty years after the publication of his first novel, Carrie, Stephen King writes “What I’ve Learned” for Esquire, including this very King-esque gem: If you ask what I learned from my accident, it would be: Number one, stay on the sidewalk.AI. You can’t flick your phone to scroll without hearing about it. Neven Mrgan writes about the time he got an AI-generated email from a friend of his. Spoiler alert: He didn’t like it.An electric spoon that “enhances salty taste of food and promotes healthier eating?” What? In Japan. Of course.The Parable of the Sofa — a lovely little anecdote about fixing things instead of replacing them.84-24 is a stunningly, sumptuously designed website that walks you through the process of restoring an original Macintosh from 1984. Even if you’re not interested in the subject matter, you should still check this site out just for the design of it.Wally “Famous” Amos passed away in August. Here’s a lovely little story about the man from Mark Evanier.This dude has way too much time on his hands: Man Sets Record For Most Gaming Consoles Connected To A Single TV

From my Newsletter: I Hunt Killers Tidbits

This month, we’re back to some tidbits from the I Hunt Killers vault!

Originally, the Impressionist was called the Finger. Because, well, he was cutting off people’s fingers. But then my editor pointed out that a killer called the Finger might be unintentionally humorous because of, you know, the finger.

Around the same time she said this, I was already considering the artistic school of impressionism and the nature of copycat killers. It was a pretty seamless transition from the Finger to the Impressionist, and I like to think that I would have gotten there even without her gentle nudge, but who knows?

In any event, in the two bits below, “the Finger” refers to the serial killer later known as the Impressionist…

First up, Jazz talking to G. William…

“We think it’s the Finger.”

“Just because he took a trophy? There have been four Finger copycats—“

“And they all took their trophies post-mortem.”

“You mean…this guy took his while the victim was still alive?” “Yeah.”

Jazz couldn’t help it — he shivered for just a moment, hoping that G. William wouldn’t notice. Or that if he did, he would think the shiver came from revulsion or disgust, not from the sudden, magical moment of imagining the spurt — the absolute gush — of blood that would follow severing a finger from a still living, breathing human being. The pain would be…exquisite.

And then another moment in the conversation, as Jazz and G. William discuss the actual methodology…

“There’s a contusion on the back of the head. Like with the other victims.” “He knocks them out.”

“Yeah. Figure it’s easier to cut off the finger if the victim’s unconscious.”

Jazz shivered. No. “No,” he said. “That’s not what he does. He knocks them out for some other reason. Maybe to incapacitate them. But he cuts off the finger while they’re awake.”

“How do you figure?”

“That’s why he does it. It’s not just the gush of blood. It’s the look in their eyes. The expression on their faces. The terror. The screams. The anguish. There’s no other reason to do it, G. William. The blood’s not enough. Might as well do it post-mortem. It’s the look. It’s the fear.”

“You sure about this?” G. William’s eyes had narrowed and he was trying to hide his concern, but that was impossible to hide from Jazz.

Jazz pretended not to notice. “I’m sure. That’s what drives him.”

(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: Hopscotch

Hopscotch, by Brian Garfield, is an old, old book. Published in 1975 (yikes!), it’s the story of a CIA agent who is retired against his will and decides to get revenge on the Agency by publishing a tell-all memoir of all its dirty tricks.

The book was made into a wonderful, hilarious movie starring Walter Matthau back in 1980. My dad was a huge fan of it and rented it often. I watched it with him and really enjoyed it, which is why I recently decided to track down the book and read it.

And oh my God. It is so good! For a thriller, it is gorgeously written. I mean, I was absolutely blown away by the prose. If you like beautiful writing, I urge you to check out Hopscotch. Yes, it’s an old book, but it feels timeless and relevant, and the writing will have you rescanning every page, just to drink it in again and again.

(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: Serial Killer of the Month!

Arthur John Shawcross was one of the serial killers I researched in-depth when writing I Hunt Killers. He was…a pretty sick dude. The thing that sticks in my mind the most is that he used to tell his victims to take off their clothes and then told them to fold the clothes neatly and set them aside. It’s a twisted bit of psychological manipulation. Someone tells you to fold your clothes and put them aside, well, you assume that’s because you’ll be putting the clothes back on at some point, right?

Not.

It was all bull. But it made the victims more compliant because they figured they’d be surviving the experience as long as they obeyed. But they didn’t. Not a one of them. He killed fourteen, including two children.

He also used to stuff his victims’ orifices with grass and weeds. I mean…OK.

That little datum was too much for Bethany, the lovely young woman who was my editor’s assistant on I Hunt Killers. When Jazz thinks about Shawcross, he originally contemplated the stuffing business. Bethany asked me to please take it out — it was too much.

Out of deference to her sensitivities, I removed that bit. And then proceeded to use it in Game. 😈

(By that point, reading my stuff had thoroughly desensitized her to the point that she was OK with it by now. Sorry for traumatizing you, Bethany!)

Anyway, Shawcross was a real piece of work. Dude had two out of the three of the Macdonald triad (bed-wetting and starting fires), but c’mon — you and I both know he was torturing animals somewhere and just never got caught.

Shawcross was imprisoned at one point early on and many lives probably would have been saved, but there was a prison riot and he helped a guard…so he was let out early. And people died.

He was caught again, sentenced to something like 250 years. Never made it that long, obviously — he died of a heart attack in prison in 2008.

You can read more about him here.

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

Stories I Never Told: Karate Kid

Over in my newsletter (are you subscribed? If not, why not???), I posted my never-before-seen Karate Kid1 proposal for DC Comics, written way back in 2007 or so.

But I just had to share it with the world. So here you go, fellow Legion geeks. Click here to read what could have been and what never was…