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 at
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."
One of the questions I'm asked over and over (and it's a
good one) is how I'm able to write in both the thriller and the
fantasy genres. It seems to me the proper way to answer is to ask instead
what drew me to these genres in the first place.
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 responded to 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 like 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.
© 2005 Eric Van Lustbader
Eric Van
Lustbader was born and raised in Greenwich Village. He is the author
of more than twenty five best-selling novels including THE NINJA in
which he introduced Nicholas Linnear, one of modern fiction's most beloved
and enduring heroes. For the last several years, he has devoted himself
to writing THE PEARL fantasy series. His novels have been translated
into over twenty languages and are bestsellers worldwide. They are so
popular whole sections of bookstores from Bangkok to Dublin are devoted
to them. His latest bestseller is THE BOURNE LEGACY.
