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WHERE THRILLERS AND FANTASY MEET: ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD
When I was about nine, my father got very sick and had to stay home from work. My parents decided that they didn't want to me to see him like that, so they shipped me off to summer camp. I hated it. I hated living in a bunk with other boys, I hated having to get up a a certain time, eat at a certain time, join in team sports at a certain time, well, you get the idea. But the thing I hated most of all was feeling as if I had to join the idiotic and often humiliating male bonding rituals devised by the bunk bully. In fact, I didn't. And though this act of defiance earned me nothing but ridicule from my bunkmates and threats from the bully I never backed down. The fact was I couldn't. Being alone -- being my own person -- was so precious to me that I risked everything for it, even being called "The Outsider."
I recount this defining incident because it's crucial to the question I'm asked over and over (and it's a good one), namely, how I'm able to write in both the thriller and the fantasy genres. In trying to answer in a true and meaningful way I came to realize that what drew me to these particular genres in the first place was this early experience of myself as the Outsider, which, I've come to understand, defines both who I was and who I am.
Not surprisingly, I suppose, these were the two forms of novels I read as a teenager, and since I was a voracious reader I consumed tons of them, good, bad and ugly. On the surface there wouldn't seem to be any similarity between a spy story and a fantasy saga, but the fact is there must have been - and there is - for me to have been attracted to both.
To begin at the beginning, as the Red Queen said, I was never a joiner. Already fascinated by psychology and sociology, I read all about peer pressure and the havoc it wreaked on teens. I found this peculiar because I myself never felt peer pressure. Only years later did I recognize the price I paid for not being a hale fellow well-met.
I was always on the outside of society looking in, and even though that was where I'd chosen to be, it was a lonely existence. I grew up with a tangible fear of being "normal" - of marrying, moving to the suburbs, having 2.5 kids and a dog, spending my time with other couples talking about every minute phase of our children's development from poop to verbalization skills.
In fact, I was so terrified of "normalcy" that during my wedding I took off my suit jacket and put on a black satin baseball-style jacket that had "Don't Fear the Reaper" emblazoned across its back that I'd designed for Blue Oyster Cult during my days working at CBS Records.
Okay, so now we know how it all ties together, right? The common thread running through my two favorite genres was "the outsider." The protagonists in both thrillers and fantasies are misfits, those people who because of their special skills are outside the mainstream of society. In both genres, the protagonists struggle mightily both to control their gifts and the terrible forms of loneliness they must endure.
And, too, there is a larger, even more fascinating problem that both genres address: the struggle of "the outsider" to find oneself and to come to terms with who one is.
As a Sociology major at Columbia College, this problem was the one that engaged me most fully, and it was when I came to understand my own nature and, eventually, to recognize the burning desire inside me to write about the special nature of "the outsider."
Of course, I had help with this. The seminal moment in my outsider epiphany was when I picked up a book appropriately titled The Outsider, a nonfiction treatise on the alienation of modern man, written by a brilliant English writer by the name of Colin Wilson. Soon thereafter, I read his astonishing A Casebook of Murder, a horrifying and mesmerizing compendium of the world's most macabre murder cases. Then I discovered that he was a novelist as well: The Black Room, Lingard and Necessary Doubt.
What drew me to Wilson's subject matter was exactly what drew me to thrillers and fantasy: I wanted to read about people who were outsiders, who felt themselves to be at the borders of society - both those ike me, who live a moral life, as well as the terrifying others, at the extreme fringes of "otherness," who consider themselves to be beyond the law.
Though I had been writing in one form or another virtually since the moment I had learned to spell, once I understood the truth of who I was, there was no getting around it. It was time to create the novels of outsiders that were firing inside me.
-- ERIC VAN LUSTBADER
When I was about nine, my father got very sick and had to stay home from work. My parents decided that they didn't want to me to see him like that, so they shipped me off to summer camp. I hated it. I hated living in a bunk with other boys, I hated having to get up a a certain time, eat at a certain time, join in team sports at a certain time, well, you get the idea. But the thing I hated most of all was feeling as if I had to join the idiotic and often humiliating male bonding rituals devised by the bunk bully. In fact, I didn't. And though this act of defiance earned me nothing but ridicule from my bunkmates and threats from the bully I never backed down. The fact was I couldn't. Being alone -- being my own person -- was so precious to me that I risked everything for it, even being called "The Outsider."
I recount this defining incident because it's crucial to the question I'm asked over and over (and it's a good one), namely, how I'm able to write in both the thriller and the fantasy genres. In trying to answer in a true and meaningful way I came to realize that what drew me to these particular genres in the first place was this early experience of myself as the Outsider, which, I've come to understand, defines both who I was and who I am.
Not surprisingly, I suppose, these were the two forms of novels I read as a teenager, and since I was a voracious reader I consumed tons of them, good, bad and ugly. On the surface there wouldn't seem to be any similarity between a spy story and a fantasy saga, but the fact is there must have been - and there is - for me to have been attracted to both.
To begin at the beginning, as the Red Queen said, I was never a joiner. Already fascinated by psychology and sociology, I read all about peer pressure and the havoc it wreaked on teens. I found this peculiar because I myself never felt peer pressure. Only years later did I recognize the price I paid for not being a hale fellow well-met.
I was always on the outside of society looking in, and even though that was where I'd chosen to be, it was a lonely existence. I grew up with a tangible fear of being "normal" - of marrying, moving to the suburbs, having 2.5 kids and a dog, spending my time with other couples talking about every minute phase of our children's development from poop to verbalization skills.
In fact, I was so terrified of "normalcy" that during my wedding I took off my suit jacket and put on a black satin baseball-style jacket that had "Don't Fear the Reaper" emblazoned across its back that I'd designed for Blue Oyster Cult during my days working at CBS Records.
Okay, so now we know how it all ties together, right? The common thread running through my two favorite genres was "the outsider." The protagonists in both thrillers and fantasies are misfits, those people who because of their special skills are outside the mainstream of society. In both genres, the protagonists struggle mightily both to control their gifts and the terrible forms of loneliness they must endure.
And, too, there is a larger, even more fascinating problem that both genres address: the struggle of "the outsider" to find oneself and to come to terms with who one is.
As a Sociology major at Columbia College, this problem was the one that engaged me most fully, and it was when I came to understand my own nature and, eventually, to recognize the burning desire inside me to write about the special nature of "the outsider."
Of course, I had help with this. The seminal moment in my outsider epiphany was when I picked up a book appropriately titled The Outsider, a nonfiction treatise on the alienation of modern man, written by a brilliant English writer by the name of Colin Wilson. Soon thereafter, I read his astonishing A Casebook of Murder, a horrifying and mesmerizing compendium of the world's most macabre murder cases. Then I discovered that he was a novelist as well: The Black Room, Lingard and Necessary Doubt.
What drew me to Wilson's subject matter was exactly what drew me to thrillers and fantasy: I wanted to read about people who were outsiders, who felt themselves to be at the borders of society - both those ike me, who live a moral life, as well as the terrifying others, at the extreme fringes of "otherness," who consider themselves to be beyond the law.
Though I had been writing in one form or another virtually since the moment I had learned to spell, once I understood the truth of who I was, there was no getting around it. It was time to create the novels of outsiders that were firing inside me.
-- ERIC VAN LUSTBADER
