Barry Lyga's Blog: The BLog, page 5

When I was nine, my parents got divorced. My parents shared custody, but in those days that meant that I lived with my mom and saw my dad on alternate weekends and holidays. At the time, we lived in a suburb of Baltimore, a sort of progressive-leaning enclave that lacked true diversity, but also made all of the (era-appropriate) noises about enlightenment, tolerance, etc.

After the divorce, Mom and my new stepfather moved us about half an hour north and west, to a rural town out in the sticks. Understand that this was 1980, so rural meant no cable TV, obviously no internet. It was a more isolated place and while we didn’t use the term then, now we would (and do) call it a red town. The opposite of the place I’d lived up until then. Occasionally, the KKK would hold rallies in a field next door to the house of a guy who became a good friend of mine. (To be clear: He wasn’t a fan of the KKK. They used the field next to his house and his mom couldn’t stop them.)

My first experience in this new town was when my mom took my test scores to my new school so that I could be placed for fifth grade in the fall. According to her, the principal looked at my paperwork, told her “No one scores like this,” and decided that I would be in the “average” class as opposed to the advanced class, where I’d always been at my previous school.1

Everyone in that class hated me.

Even the teacher mocked me, calling me “the human encyclopedia” or “the walking dictionary.” Just because I was a smart kid.2

This was my first experience with the streak of anti-intellectualism in the U.S. The first time I saw hatred directed at me just because of my brain. It was stark and shocking and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t have a lasting impact on me. A whole year as the new kid, in a new school, mercilessly mocked and bullied for…being smart? Really? That was a thing?

At the time, without pervasive, intrusive mass media, the difference in moving a mere half-hour away was tremendous. I went from a Democratic-leaning, reality-based community to a right-leaning one. A place where parents insisted their kids not use the fluoride offered by the school (what?) and signed their kids out of health class because they didn’t want them to learn about their bodies (double what?).

And that’s before you add in religion.

I’d been raised in a mixed household. My Jewish mother was not religious at all. “A long time ago, a bunch of people wandered in the desert and made up stories to get through it,” I remember her telling me.

My dad took me to church semi-regularly, but didn’t seem to take it too seriously. He, too, leaned into the “these are stories” philosophy, and going to church seemed more about tradition and keeping my grandparents off his back than anything else.

So, I knew religion, but I didn’t take it seriously, and no one around me did, either.

Until I moved.

These new people around me took their religion very seriously. I discovered this on the playground one recess when I very innocently and casually mentioned that my mother was Jewish, and my new friend Richard informed me very gravely that “Your mom killed Christ.”

To this point, I had not experienced any sort of antisemitism, much less this very specific line of religious bullshit. I told Richard he was wrong (because, well, he was) and he insisted and even though I didn’t know where the hell this was coming from, I knew at the age of ten that if someone dissed3 your mom, you had to fight.

So Richard and I fought the way ten-year-olds fought and the whole thing is just galactically stupid.

Which is the theme of this piece. Stupidity. Ignorance. Dumbasses.

Dumbasses who are happy to let their kids’ teeth rot because they’re afraid of fluoride, who are happy to let their kids get sick or pregnant or both because they’re afraid of knowledge, who are happy to spread religious bullshit because it’s all they know.

Like the farmers in my new community who, years later, as the local paper reported, were suffering from a drought and complained to their Congressional representative that the government was preventing rain. And the rep didn’t laugh at this or explain reality to them, but rather listened seriously and promised to look into it back in Washington.

That rep (who took office when I was in college) was a man named Roscoe Bartlett. By all accounts, an intelligent man, with a doctorate in physiology. I’m sure he knew that the complaints of government weather control were crap, but he decided to go along to get along and thereby gave credence to their idiocy. He bolstered their nonsense suppositions and conspiracy theories.

Giving the dumbasses a fig leaf, which is all they ever need to spread their garbage.

Sound familiar? Of course it does. It’s the world we live in now, except half the fucking country thinks the government controls the weather and half the fucking people in charge are willing to go along with them.

Wondering how we got here? Well, it doesn’t help that most Americans can’t read beyond a sixth grade level. My daughter is in fourth grade and she reads at higher than a sixth grade level. My ten-year-old is better able to process and interpret information than millions of adults who get to vote.

But even if these people could read and comprehend what they read, the problem is that they wouldn’t. Because almost half of all Americans don’t read any books at all.  And even those who do, at best, read one book every two months.

So, yeah. Basically, you have a culture of people who have limited knowledge, don’t care that they have limited knowledge, and lack the capacity to rectify the situation.

Here’s a great example of what we’re up against, one that hits home for me. Back in November of 2023, a very stupid woman in Dover, New Hampshire filed a complaint to have my book Boy Toy removed from high school libraries. You’ll see why I call her very stupid in a moment.

This woman — her name is Julie Porter4 — filed her complaint and when the school district said, “Nah, it’s a good book; we’re gonna keep it,” she appealed. She lost the appeal, too. Yay.

But her complaint is a public document, so I looked at it. And of course it’s the usual farrago of blatant misreadings, confusion, and bad faith arguments, but this one element jumped out at me:

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I was thrown by this. Because Boy Toy doesn’t have a subtitle, and even if it did, it certainly wouldn’t be identical to the title of my first novel!

So, let’s look at the cover, shall we?

U.S. Hardcover Edition

Let’s zoom in and see exactly what…

Oh, for the love of… It’s not a subtitle! It’s goddamn marketing copy! It’s plain as day: “By the author of.” What in the name of Zeus’s electrical testicles is wrong with this person? This epically, grotesquely, profoundly sub-moronic jackass?

Honest to God, these are the people we’re dealing with, people who are so blindingly fucking stupid that they can’t properly interpret a book cover, but have declared themselves competent to judge books. For everyone.

I don’t mind people being idiots, but do it on your time and don’t let it collide with my life.

But we don’t get to have nice things. And I don’t know how the hell you talk to people so abjectly, aggressively dumb.

“I love the poorly educated.” Well, of course he does. Because the dumbasses will do whatever you tell them, without questioning it. He loves the dumbasses because he’s one, too. He literally said on live television, “I have concepts of a plan.” I mean, come on!

He loves the dumbasses and they love him. Because they hate anyone smarter than them, which is pretty much anyone with a lick of sense. And because our country has done precisely zilch to combat the rising tide of anti-intellectualism, a tide rising long before I moved to the hinterlands, we find ourselves here. Now.

Today at noon, as I press “Publish” on this post, we bear witness to the (final?) Tr(i)ump(h) of the Dumbasses.

Good luck with that.

Herb Baumeister has made it difficult to discuss his serial killing proclivities because he took one final victim: Himself. He committed suicide in 1996, just as police were beginning to question his wife about some of Herb’s activities.

See, someone in the Indianapolis area was luring young men away from gay bars and those young men were never seen again. Ultimately, the police found the remains of at least 25 people on Baumeister’s property. In total, there were thousands and thousands of individual parts, making it really hard to figure out exactly how many victims there might have been.

One of those parts was a human skull that Baumeister’s own child stumbled upon.

Baumeister went out into the Canadian woods and shot himself in the head. He left a note apologizing for making a mess in the woods, but said nothing about all those poor guys he murdered. Which shows you where his priorities were, I guess.

Here’s more info about him.

Over in my newsletter, I ran the never-before-seen Legion of Super-Heroes graphic novel proposal that I originally wrote back in 2020 for DC then-head honcho Bobbie Chase. It never went anywhere, but I thought y’all might enjoy it…

This is my never-published Legion of Super-Heroes graphic novel proposal from 2020…

Back during the pandemic lockdown, I was invited by DC’s Bobbie Chase to submit some graphic novel pitches for DC’s then-nascent YA line. Me being me, of course I decided to dial up the difficulty by pitching the Legion of Super-Heroes, the most continuity-laden, reboot-burdened, complicated property in DC’s line-up.

Because apparently I play the video game of life on Hard.

Anyway, Bobbie and I talked about it a little bit and she had some reservations and then she was no longer at DC, so the whole thing became moot. But I thought the geeks among you might like to see it!

Superman:
The Legion of Super-Heroes

You’re thinking: Yikes. Not the Legion!

There’s, like, a hundred members. And they each have siblings and parents. Plus villains. And sundry supporting cast. It’s impossible to keep track! And to add insult to injury, it’s set a thousand years in the future!

Don’t worry. We’re going to use about half a dozen of them, while still giving a sense of the scope of the team.

Also, we’re going to avoid the problem so many folks run into with the Legion, which is — for some inexplicable reason — always bringing an “away team” into the present. Look, a big part of the glory of the Legion is its far-flung setting. I’m going to lean into that, with not one, not two, but three versions of the future.

Stick with me. It’ll all make sense and it won’t be confusing in the least. I swear on my replica flight ring.

(And look — this is a character-driven piece, but it’s the nature of the beast that there’s gonna be some sci-fi weirdness. The sci-fi weirdness doesn’t conflict with the character elements; it enhances them.)

We start with Superboy.

**********

Clark Kent has a problem.

At sixteen, he’s the most powerful kid on the planet. Hell, in the solar system. You think it’s rough being in high school when you don’t fit into a convenient clique? Try not fitting into the species.

It should be simple: He has powers and he uses them to help people. That’s just the way it’s supposed to go, right? The strong help the weak, the mighty defend the small, and everyone is uplifted.

But Superboy yearns for something more. He could spend 24 hours a day being “on call,” and still never save every life, root out every evil, extinguish every conflict. He needs something to keep him on an even keel. He’s physically indestructible, but the stresses of a dual identity, teendom, and, y’know, saving the world on the regular are getting to him.

Is this his destiny? Is he fated to be alone, to be isolated from the very people he saves? Even in his secret identity, is he always going to be the outcast?

Superboy needs to figure out how to grow up into Superman without laying waste to the planet in a fit of teen pique. He wants a place where he can be himself. He wants friends that he doesn’t have to lie to all the time.

Enter: The Legion of Super-Heroes! Founding members Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy! Teens heroes from the far-flung future, the year 3020!

It begins when Clark takes a shortcut home through town, lost in his thoughts. As he rounds a corner, a beautiful girl lingers there, leaning against the wall of the Smallville Savings and Loan. She greets him with, “Hello, Superboy.”

She’s gone almost before he can stammer out a surprised “Say what?”

And then the same thing happens two more times, this time with a red-headed boy and a black-haired kid. Three strangers to town who know the truth he’s tried so hard to hide.

But of course they know — they’re from the future, where Superboy’s secret identity is a matter of historical record. They’ve traveled back in time to recruit Superboy to join their “super-hero club” and give him — at last — what he’s so longed for: Friends who “get” him. A clique of his own, one not comprised of kids who might as well be made of papier mache, for all their fragility.

The bring him to the future, where there is some hazing, of course, some shenanigans and ridiculous teen rituals to endure, but when it’s all said and done, Superboy is a member of the Legion.

The 31st century is…amazing. It’s basically a fifties sci-fi flick come to life, with gleaming, rounded buildings, floating cars, no pollution. There are giant fins on everything. It’s a candy-colored universe of cool aliens and amazing tech, all guarded over by a group of super-powered teenagers from around the galaxy.

It’s basically the greatest thing ever. Superboy starts spending every moment of his free time there. Home from school, homework done at superspeed, and then it’s off to the future to hang with his new pals. Finally, he belongs. And heck, that cute Triplicate Girl even seems to have a crush on him.

We get a sense of the sheer size of the team through updates on their Mission Monitor Board, which lets us keep the “on-panel” team manageably small, while still showing that this is a big group.

Clark starts to think that maybe, just maybe, he should move to the 31st century. For him, going back and forth through time to visit his adoptive parents is no more difficult than someone who moved to the West Coast heading back East for the holidays. Why not stay in the perfect future, the place where he feels most at home, most at ease, most himself?

It’s the easiest thing to do. It requires no sacrifice on his part. And he’s still doing good work with the Legion, so it’s not like he’s shirking his duty. He’s just…time-shifted it.

Of course, it’s too good to be true.

A voice begins calling to him. At first, he ignores it, but eventually he can’t help himself — he follows the voice to a hidden subbasement in Legion headquarters, where he discovers a door.

His friends rush to him, but before they can stop him, he opens the door and is sucked into…

…the real 31st century!

His guide — the source of the voice — is Dawnstar, a winged descendant of Native Americans with a strange “tracking ability” that has allowed her to cross dimensions in pursuit of Superboy. She leads him into what is actually the year 3020, and it ain’t pretty.

It rains. Constantly.

The city is smog-choked. Overcrowded. Rusted, broken tech litters the streets. The people live in terror and in hiding. The burnt-out husks of vehicles line the boulevards. It’s a war zone after the war’s ended and no one has bothered to clean up.

“This is the future you are going to make, Superboy,” she tells him.

“Me?” he explodes. “What did I do?”

It’s not what he did, she explains. It’s what he didn’t do.

Seduced by the pop art version of the future he’s been living in, Superboy had made the decision to stay in the 31st century for good. Ergo, no Superman in the 21st century. No Superman means no heroic inspiration resounding down through the centuries to lift up humanity and create the shining future we all dream of.

The “fifties” version of the future he was living in? Not real. At all.

He’s been stuck inside the Virt. Short for “virtual reality,” but it’s so much more than that. With 31st century advanced technology, the Virt is pretty much its own universe, concocted and designed and maintained specifically to give young Clark his anodyne dream come true. Seduction on a universal scale.

(This is where it gets sci-fi-y. In the wise words of Sledge Hammer: Trust me; I know what I’m doing.)

In the year 3020, Dawnstar explains, the powerful wizard Mordru the Merciless realized that he could never conquer the world due to the resistance of the Legion of Super-Heroes. And so he created a false version of the world, using his magic to empower the Virt even further than its own technology could allow, creating a bespoke universe designed to seduce the young Superboy into his clutches and change history such that the Legion never existed. Virtspace is something like 99% as real as the real world at this point. Everything Superboy experienced is real, but it was all at the direction of Mordru, for the nefarious purpose of killing Superboy’s good intentions.

Dawnstar goes on: Now there are three versions of the future: There’s the Virt. There’s the world in which Mordru rules all, the world Superboy has followed Dawnstar into. And there’s the real 31st century, a shining example of optimism and human progress that is more complicated and more nuanced than the simplistic version in the Virt. That’s the version Dawnstar is from, a timeline that is rapidly decaying and will soon vanish from existence altogether.

Unless Superboy acts.

She takes him to a spot in Metropolis, where a sewage treatment plant rears up into the sky.

“This is where the Superman Museum was supposed to be. Where it was, in my timeline,” she tells him. “We used to come here all the time, to be inspired by your example, to rededicate ourselves to live up to it. But without that example…”

She says no more, only gestures around them at the wreck and ruin of the year 3020. Mordru’s playground.

As much as Clark wants to go back into the Virt and have that idealized version of his life, he understands now that he has to sacrifice his wants and needs. His powers make him physically indestructible, but he can still be hurt in his heart, in his soul. And it’s like ripping off an arm, but he sees now that he must return to the present, that he must allow himself to pretend to be the human being he is not. His own comfort and desires and wishes are meaningless compared to the suffering of untold billions down through the centuries.

He’s not some kid who gets to grow up and settle down in the ‘burbs.

He’s going to be Superman.

The world demands more from him.

The world deserves more from him.

Battling his way through Mordru’s hordes, he locates the time travel equipment he needs and plows back through the millennium that separates his era from the Legion’s. Mordru’s reality begins to crumble, to be replaced with the future as it was always meant to be, a future that we would recognize as being made by real people, not fantasies.

Soon, Clark is back home in Smallville.

Where, once more, he must get through life every day pretending to be someone and something he is not.

But this time…this time it’s a little easier.

Eventually, he confides the truth to his parents, telling them about his temptations and his decision.

Morose and beating himself up, he says, “If I had it all to do over again, Pa, I’d do it differently. I really would.”

“I know,” his father tells him. “And that’s the lesson you take from this.”

“You are extraordinary,” says his mother, “so your sacrifices are extraordinary, too. But if you want an ordinary life, no one should stop you from having that.”

But, no. He can’t. Once, perhaps, the idea of giving up, of not using his powers, of just living life like anyone else might have been attractive to him, and the idea of those who would suffer as a result was just an abstraction. But now he’s seen it. He’s lived it.

He is Superboy. And someday, he will be Superman. And damn it, he will be the very best version of both.

Meanwhile (if that word means anything when we’re talking about time travel…), in the future that was always meant to be, the Legion visits the Superman Museum and thrills to the exhibits that reveal the amazing feats and incredible sacrifices of the Man of Steel and how they formed the world they now live in.

And Lightning Lad looks over at Saturn Girl and says, “So, do you think it’s time…?”

**********

Back in the present, Clark Kent rounds a corner in town, taking a shortcut home from school. A beautiful girl lingers there, leaning against the wall of the Smallville Savings and Loan.

“Hello, Superboy,” she says.

And Clark grins.

Yes. This time, he’ll do it differently.

Long live the Legion!

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

Two months ago, I posted an excerpt from BRIDEKILLER, the first book in a new Jasper Dent series. Here’s the next scene for ya…

“Take the next left and get on the highway,” he told her.

She had introduced herself as Special Agent Maxine de la Croix. He hadn’t bothered introducing himself. In de la Croix’s inoffensive rental, he directed her off the two-laner that contracted to one lane while bisecting the heart of town. The town of Lobo’s Nod had a way of making most things smaller when it absorbed them. Roadways were no exception.

“There’s a place closer,” de la Croix said. “In town. I saw it on my way. Local joint. Coff-E-Shop or something. Looked nice.”

“I don’t go there. There’s a Starbucks one exit up.”

She hesitated only a moment, then signaled and switched lanes. Lobo’s Nod, his hometown, his home base, disappeared behind them.

“Do people still call you Jazz?” she asked, glancing over at him.

He favored her with the most withering look in his collection and very deliberately said nothing.

She returned her attention to the road. “OK, look, I’m here because—”

“Because the Bureau sends someone like you every few months. Congratulations — you have the length of the trip to Starbucks and back to talk to me. That’s better than anyone else they’ve sent. They might give you a raise.”

“All we want—”

“You guys think that just because my parents were serial killers, I’ve got some kind of gift for hunting them down.”

“You did a fair job of nailing your parents a few years back. And a few of their buddies, too.”

He grunted. “I was a teenager. I thought I was invincible. And a lot of people got hurt.”

“You’re too young to pull off the grizzled veteran routine,” she said, her tone tired and snappish. Her face crumpled in self-reproach as soon as she said it. He grinned.

By now they’d pulled into the drive-through lane at the closest Starbucks. De la Croix ordered for them both, handed his coffee to him, and — after a moment’s hesitation — headed back to the Dent house. Jasper took a sip of his coffee, even though it was scalding hot.

“Sorry about that before,” she muttered.

“Don’t be. You finally said something not in the FBI script. Good for you.” He saluted her with his coffee.

With a rueful chuckle, she tapped her cup against his. They both drank in silence for a moment as she drove.

“It’s not that I want to be difficult,” he said, staring out the windshield. “I just don’t want to be involved in—”

“We think it’s a Crow.”

He stopped. He did everything in his power to resist turning back to her, but all his power was not enough. Face-to-face with her, he set his jaw and, with as much testosterone as he could muster said, “Do not screw with me. Not about this.”

“I’m not. I swear.”

The Crows. A secret nationwide collective of serial killers. So well concealed that no one who wasn’t a member even knew they existed until Jasper, as a teenager, had gone up against the Crow King, Janice.

His mother.

And her right-hand man, Jasper’s father, Billy.

Together, they had a serial killing career that spanned decades and bodies in the triple digits, but that was only the veneer of their depravity. The Crows were massing power and influence, placing their more agreeable members in positions of social influence and power, all in pursuit of an insane agenda that seemed to revolve around the idea of turning the country into a hunting preserve for serial killers.

The notion was so mad as to be risible, but the fact that the Crows had operated for so long without being discovered smothered any amusement he may have considered.

“Are you sure?” he heard himself ask. Despite his best, most cherished intentions, his temples began to pulse. His breathing had quickened ever so slightly.

They’d pulled into his driveway. De la Croix cut the engine and sighed, turning in her seat to regard him.

“This is the end of our trip. I guess you’ll never know.”

Her lips curled the bare minimum to qualify for a self-satisfied smile. She truly looked nothing at all like Connie, but in that moment he desperately wanted her to. It would make his capitulation a tiny bit easier.

“Let’s go inside,” he said.

Here are some things with which to interrupt your doomscrolling…

A professor from my alma mater is helping to probe the “infant universe.” Look, that’s just darn cool. If you could probe the infant universe, you know you would!This is the greatest Ratatouille cosplay EVER.Spider-Man Co-Creator Steve Ditko has often been misunderstood…partly because he never really bothered to explain himself. A great piece from Rolling Stone on his life and what he left behind.)Eddie Vedder surprises David Letterman and blows the audience away. Back in the day. Great stuff.

Every year, I track the books I read and take care to flag the ones that are really, really good. Here are my top books for 2024, in no particular order:

Friday, Book One: The First Day of Christmas by Ed Brubaker & Marcos MartinThe 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart TurtonClean Room Vol. 1: Immaculate Conception by Gail Simone & John Davis-HuntBreaking the Dark: A Jessica Jones Marvel Crime Novel by Lisa JewellHope Rides Again: An Obama Biden Mystery by Andrew ShafferJulia Unbound by Catherine Egan (read the whole damn trilogy — it’s so good!)Hopscotch by Brian GarfieldThe Hunger and the Dusk, Vol. 1 by G. Willow Wilson & Chris WildgooseBatman/Superman: The Archive Of Worlds by Gene Luen Yang & divers artists!The Reformatory by Tananarive Du

Here’s a weird connection to contemporary news: Serial killer Bobby Joe Long was executed in Florida by lethal injection in 2019. The governor who signed his death warrant? Ron DeSantis. I applaud Mr. DeSantis’s decision in this, if not in much else. Bobby Joe Long was a nasty piece of work: He used to deliver appliances for a living, and if he happened upon a house with a woman along, he would just go ahead and rape her.

Eventually, he moved on to murder.

Readers of I Hunt Killers may recall Long’s name from Jazz’s mantra: “People matter. People are real. Remember Bobby Joe Long.” That’s because Long’s compulsion to rape and murder eventually, somehow, became a compulsion to let a victim go. Even though he knew doing so would lead to his capture. He was just as helpless in the throes of that that need to release her as he claimed to be in the throes of the urge to harm.

The world is vastly better off without him. You can read more about him here.

For literally ten years now, people have been asking me, “When will the I Hunt Killers prequels be available in print?”

The stories have been available as ebooks for years, but people like their dead trees. And I don’t blame them!

So…

Before the Hunt will be out in 2025! And ten lucky subscribers to my newsletter will get a copy before anyone else!

Go sign up for the newsletter and get ready for the upcoming November issue, which will contain more details about the book, including how you can get one early!

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.

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.”

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