Excerpt
Back in the 60s . . .
On Wednesday October 13th, 1968, a faculty panel recommended the dismissal of Professor John Harris—in absentia, as no one at Harvard had seen or heard from him in weeks. Harris later bragged about delivering his final lecture on “one shitload and a half of LSD.” According to the recording made available to the faculty panel, this was the sum total of that lecture:
“Good afternoon. Wow. American Literature, hunh? Let’s see. Moby Dick today. Right?”
“Moby Dick?” asked a confused voice. “No. What happened to The Scarlet Letter?”
“Right. Moby Dick,” Harris continued. “Great book. None of you have read it. None of you are going to read it. Nobody ever does. What you need to understand is that as far as I’m concerned—and I’m the fucking professor—Moby Dick is the same story as The Great Gatsby, which some of you may read. I call it, ‘the half-assed struggle of the individual to put their world to rights in the face of a failure that threatens to define their life.’ I think that’s from my thesis. Though maybe it’s not pretentious enough.”
Harris laughed. “Hey! How about this? Great Gatsby/Moby Dick: same story, different era, right? So, if someone someday tries to write that story for this generation, they should call it The Great Dick. That’d be perfect, wouldn’t it? The Great Dick. Alright, that’s got to be almost fifty minutes. See you next . . . whenever. Wow.”
CHAPTER 1
Okay, let me start out by admitting that I was an asshole. I know that. The ludicrous amount of fame and acclaim and money I’ve had dumped on me since that time only makes it more glaring. The fact that we lived in a different world back in 1982 is no excuse. It was the same world. It just wasn’t the world we thought it was.
I remember it was a Sunday night. Sundays always feel different. Looking back now and Googling a 1982 calendar, I’d guess it was Sunday, March 21st. I remember waking up and within minutes making the decision to leave. Quickly, before I could change my mind, I eased myself out of the rickety hide‑a‑bed.
Immediately, Maria rolled over into the spot I'd just vacated, breathing loudly through her nose and mouth, not quite snoring. I hate to say it, but she looked every minute of her thirty years. Her thick dark hair clung damply to her face; her heavy arms stretched outward. The cast on her left wrist looked like a giant manacle.
The grandfather clock beside the cigar store Indian read 1:37, though a few minutes before, it had chimed four times. That made as much sense as anything else in my life. I was thirty-five years old, a Harvard grad who’d spent the previous two years faking his way through a $13,500 a year job as an territory rep for the Richmond Tobacco company. That $13,500 was the most money I’d ever made. You’re probably thinking that when you adjust for inflation and translate that $13,500 into today’s dollars, it’s a lot more impressive.
No, it’s not.
I slipped on my jersey and my jeans and gathered the rest of my things in my old gym bag. Fortunately, enough moonlight crept in around the edges of the tattered drapes to give the room a dim glow. I wondered if it would be safe to hitchhike out of there, or if Indiana had already notified the California Highway Patrol that I was wanted.
My situation was bad. But not bad enough to, say, crawl into a grave with a rotting corpse.
That would come later.
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Author Interview
1: Tell us a little about yourself and what got you in to writing?
I’m Barry Maher and I may be the only horror novelist who’s ever appeared in the pages of Funeral Service Insider. In my misspent youth, my articles were featured in perhaps a hundred different publications and, in order to eat, I held nearly that many different jobs. Sometimes he lived on the beach. Not in a house on the beach. On the beach. With the sand and the seagulls.
Three hours into a truly excremental job—standing on a roof in the rain, holding the frayed cord of a toilet de-rooter—I thought I’d hit on a way for my writing to support me. I’d simply write a best-selling, critically-acclaimed novel. Think Sherlock Holmes meets Hamlet, if Ophelia was oversexed, homicidal and undead.
Surprisingly (to me anyway) that plot didn’t work out. But it got me to quit the rooter company. And it did lead to my first novel, which led to me being able to write and to actually afford food, which led ultimately To the Great Dick: And the Homicidal Demon. Which led to me doing this interview for author Anthony Avin.
2: Do you have a favourite time and place where you write?
Yes, my favorite time to write is when I’m awake. I get up, exercise a bit, have breakfast, then I sit down and write until lunch. After lunch, I write until dinner. Nowadays I write on my laptop in a lounge chair, looking out over Santa Barbara and the ocean and the beach which was once the only bedroom I could afford. I’ve been very lucky.
3: Where do your ideas come from?
Asia.
4: Seriously?
That’s the short answer. The long answer is that I was speaking on an Asian cruise when I realized I could no longer figure out what the hands of the clock meant. The next day, during a presentation I introduced the ship’s captain. Twenty minutes later I picked him out of the audience and asked him what he did for a living. (The uniform did look a tad familiar.) That same day, I gave up trying to understand foreign currency. Even American money was getting tricky. In Viet Nam, I handed a vendor two hundreds and a five for a $7.00 baseball cap. It was a very nice cap.
Back home, the first thing my doctor did was have me draw a clock face at ten to three. The second thing he did was take away my driver’s license. Then he sent me for an immediate MRI. The nurse there wouldn’t comment on the results, but when I asked where the restroom was, she said, “I can’t let you go in there alone.”
I explained that bathroom visitation was a particular expertise of mine.
“Like telling time?” she asked. “You need to talk to your neurosurgeon.”
“I have a neurosurgeon?” Just what I always wanted.
I also had a brain tumor—the size of a basketball. Or maybe the neurosurgeon said “baseball.” I wasn’t tracking too well at that point. Still, I quickly grasped he was planning on carving open my skull with a power saw.
“I don’t really need to tell time,” I said. “Or I can just buy a digital watch.”
Everyone said my neurosurgeon—or, as I thought of him, “Chainsaw Charlie”—was brilliant. My problem was that I’ve spent my life around intelligent people, and I’ve always believed human intelligence was overrated. To me, on a scale of everything there is to know in the universe, the main difference between Einstein and Koko the Wonder Chimp was that Einstein couldn’t pick up bananas with his feet. (As far as I know.)
Still, I went under the knife—or in this case, the power saw. Maybe I had a seizure. The doctors weren’t sure. That might explain what happened. Because I came out of the surgery with Lady Gaga singing non-stop in my head and an unforgettably vivid story, like a memory of something that I’d just witnessed.
Reacting to the intrusion, I suppose my brain could have given me a dream or a story, maybe even Citizen Kane or a nice rom/com or a few episodes of Seinfeld. But no, my got open crypts, bizarre spells, sudden death and the Ralph Lauren version of the Manson Family. “How did my operation go? Well, I’m doing well, but the people in my head—or wherever they were—they went through Hell.”
Lady Gaga went away after a day or so. But the story stayed with me. And when I was able, I spent a couple of years putting it all down, working it out, trying to get it just right. And that became The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon.
And with the cancer in remission, I’ve even lived to see the book published
4: Do you have a plan in your head of where the story is going before you start writing or do you let it carry you along as you go?
In the case of The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon, because of the way the story came to me, I knew exactly where it was going. The details and the characterization weren’t all there of course but the basic story was.
5: What genre are your books and what drew you to that genre?
I think of the Great Dick: And the Dystfunctional Demon as suspense/horror or supernatural suspense. But it also centers around a mystery. So maybe it’s a suspense/horror/mystery.
6: What dream cast would you like to see playing the characters in your latest book?
Timothée Chalamet would be perfect for the main character, the guy who calls himself Steve Witowski. But if someone was willing to make the book into a movie, I’d be happy to accept Danny Devito, Roseann Barr or Donald Duck.
7: Do you read much and if so who are your favourite authors?
I read a lot. And I read everybody. I was thrilled that one of my favorite authors, Gayle Lynds, agreed to read and then endorse The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon (My brag is that fifteen authors of that caliber provided advance raves for the book.. I never miss a chance to drop that into the conversation. You’re lucky this is the first time I’ve mentioned it in this interview.)
Other favorites of mine include Peter Straub, Edgar Allan Poe, Anne Rice, Tom Wolfe and Saki (H.H. Monroe). Saki’s writing has been described as “witty, mischievous and sometime macabre” and that’s exactly what I try to do.
8: What book/s are you reading at present?
Like I said, I read everything. At the moment, I’ve got Stephen King’s Bag of Bones on my phone and at home I’m reading John Grisham’s The Litigators.
9: What is your favourite book and why?
That’s a great question. No matter how you spell it, I don’t think I have a favorite book.
10: What advice would you give for someone thinking about becoming a writer?
Write. Turn on your computer or pick up you pen or finger paint it on the wall, but write. Being a writer is a job and you should treat it that way. Write and then rewrite. Then rewrite again. That’s the only way you get better.
If you wait around for inspiration, you’re still going to be waiting while thousands, literally thousands of other writers, are finishing their books.
11: What are the best Social Media Sites for people to find out about you and your work?
On X I’m @barrymaher On Bluesky it’s: @barrymaher.bsky.social
Newsletter: www.barrymaher.com
X: https://x.com/barrymaher
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/barrymaher.bsky.social
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barry-maher-a629212/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/barry.maher.98/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barrymaher3/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/232546.Barry_Maher
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