Even after more than a dozen novels, Lisa Unger remains a hard writer to pin down. She writes supernatural thrillers, but in a genre that tends to be very plot-driven with thin characters, her books are character dramas as much as they are edge of your seat thrillers, building tension page by page with characters who are haunted–sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally.
Her new book, Crazy Love You, is the story of Ian Paine. A successful graphic novelist who’s turned his past into a fantastic comic book adventure, he’s about to married to a woman who makes him want to be a better man. He’s also unstable, a drug addict, and his best friend Priss, well, it’s complicated. The result is a book that is darkly comic, haunting, and manages to pull off that all too rare feat of writing an incredible thriller with fully realized characters, and a supernatural drama with a plot that works together perfectly, and a novel that can read and understood perfectly on its own, but has threads that tie it into Unger’s other work. We spoke recently by phone.
ALEX DUEBEN: Where did Crazy Love You start for you?
LISA UNGER: What’s interesting about this particular book is I can always pinpont the exact germ of a story. It could be anything. It might be a line of poetry or a photograph or a news story and I get this particular feeling–a kind of zap. I start researching and investigating the ideas and I start to hear a voice or see something over and over again and I know that’s the beginning of a novel. In this case, I’m not totally sure what the germ was. It started with Ian’s voice–this unstable, edgy voice of a guy in my head. I was like, okay, I guess I’ll start following this voice into the story. This idea of a graphic novelist living in Tribeca, conflicted between his art and reality and this inner struggle between dark and light. That’s really where the story began which is not usual for me.
AD: You started with the voice and the character of Ian and his circumstances and the plot emerged from that?
LU: For me, all plot flows from character. Generally when I sit down to write I don’t have an outline. I have some kind of amorphous sense of what the story is–maybe. As I’m writing day to day, I don’t know who’s going to show up or what they’re going to do. Every novel is an act of faith that at the end there’s actually going to be a story. [laughs] There are two camps of writers I’ve found. There are people who write like this and there are people who write from strict outlines and they have character sketches and very clear idea of what story is and how every chapter is going to interact. I write for the same reason that I read–because I want to know what’s going to happen.
AD: After writing so many books, you have experience doing this, but starting with the voice of an unreliable narrator must be a challenge.
LU: It was a little crazy. [laughs] He has a lot of problems. Addiction is a big problem. Any relationship with an addict is challenging–even a fictional one! [laughs] My relationship with Lana Granger, who is the protagonist of In the Blood, was equally if not more challenging because she was just a liar–which is a totally different problem.
AD: In that sense, as you were writing the book, did your understanding of not just who Ian was, but what he was experiencing and what was real, change?
LU: Well, I didn’t have any real expectations. I was a little curious because he has this very rich creative life. He’s created this graphic novel series, Fatboy and Priss, and it grazes the edges of his own life. It’s a hyper-reality of what he has experienced–which I think is probably true of anybody who is dwelling in a fictional universe. A lot of what goes on in your fictional universe steals from and regurgitates and bumps up against your life. For me, it was trying to untangle the pieces of who he is as a writer and an artist, how much is reality and how much is fiction, and how much is one bleeding into the other. Of course he has this super-complicated relationship with Pris. His conflict between what he needs from Pris and what she gives to him, and what he needs from Megan and what she gives to him, is allegorical to the conflict that he’s experiencing within himself. Do I do nothing and slip into this dark maw within me or do I really work hard to be a better man? That was the conflict that interested me.
AD: One of the things I loved about this book–and your work in general–is that supernatural thrillers tend to be very plot driven and your books are thrillers, but they’re also character dramas.
LU: As a writer what’s interesting to me is the psyche. What makes us who we are. Is it nature? Is it nurture? Is it some impossibly complicated helix of both of those things? When I write I see myself as a kind of spelunker shimmying into these dark places. I think all plot flows from character. I’m not necessarily so interested in what is happening as why it’s happening. An interviewer asked me a similar question about how my stuff isn’t that plot driven and it’s not about violence, it’s more about people. I think violence is the end result of some psychic problem. You’re not coming to violence from nowhere. There’s a universe of things that happened to you before you ever get to that place where there’s physical violence. It’s that journey towards those things that is interesting to me.
AD: One big theme in this book–and this can be said of other books–is characters who are haunted by their past. Literally and figuratively. In the sense of their own past and the larger past.
LU: I think that’s probably true of all of us to some degree or another. Most of us aren’t living in the present tense. We’re an amalgamation of where we’ve come from, where we hope to be going, whatever’s happening to us right now. Many of us are not that aware of the present moment. It’s this constant resolving of the past with the present with where we hope to be in the future. I don’t ever think of any given moment as being anything but a mosaic of all of those things. In most cases my characters are haunted by what’s come before and a lot of them have the challenge–who do you want to be now. At some point you can’t continue to dwell in the past and say I blame this person or I blame this circumstance for everything that I am right now. At some point you have to say, okay, I claim myself. Say, I make the decision whether to continue on this dark path or go off onto a different path to something that might be more positive and more healthy. I think that’s something we probably all have to do. Hopefully not under as extreme circumstances as many of my characters. [laughs]
AD: I don’t want to give anything away, but as you were speaking, I thought of what Megan does at the end of the book, which is allegorically the story of a relationship.
LU: Exactly. You compromise. That’s what any good relationship is. You find terms on which you can both exist. Megan chose Ian and knew that she had to accept all of him–even the very dark side. In a lot of ways I think that’s what love is. Love accepts. Love lets go. Love allows the other person to be who he is. That’s a big theme in this book. The difference between what Ian and Megan can have together and what Ian and Pris had. When does love cross over that line. In the book my character Eloise Montgomery–who has been in a number of my books–tells Ian, people only act out of love or fear. There are no other motivations. I think if you boil it down, it probably is true. Love is something that is expansive and releasing and fear is something that holds on tight and pulls you under.
AD: Someone can read Crazy Love You having never read any of your books before and it makes perfect sense, they’re not missing anything and the book works perfectly on its own, but you do have a setting and characters which have appeared in other books.
LU: The Hollows is something that started for me in a book called Fragile. When the place itself turned up, I didn’t think that much of it. The story that was obsessing me at the time was something from my own past something that happened in the town where I grew up. The Hollows was not that place but sort of that place–and then it started to emerge as an entity. Almost a character. Something that had its own agenda, in a way. I started to see it as something that needed to be revisited and explored so I keep going back there. Every time I go back there it becomes something else. The Hollows is different to every character who inhabits it. It’s different to Eloise, someplace different to Jones Cooper, it’s someplace different to Lana Granger, it’s someplace different to Ian Paine. It all depends what they’re bringing to it. I think most of my books do stand alone but they have this chain link to the other books that I’ve written. I like the continuity of that, but I also like the freedom of exploring different facets of a place and the people that inhabit it.
AD: You said that The Hollows changes depending on the character. Is part of that just the way that everyone has their own take on where they live or do you think of The Hollows as a character, in a certain sense?
LU: I do think of it as a character, but I think that in a sense it’s how everyone experiences something. Everyone’s experiencing life in a really different way and that’s how I see The Hollows.
AD: Ian is a graphic novelist and I read that you didn’t know much at all about comics before you started writing the book and had a crash course in comics.
LU: I didn’t know anything, which is crazy. I would never do that. The idea of embarking on a novel without a really strong primary knowledge of the subject matter wouldn’t have occurred to me as something to do–until it happened. I had this voice and I knew what he was. I’ve always had a real appreciation for graphic novels and comics, but it’s always been a distant curiosity for me. When I realized that that’s what he was, I was like, wow, I can’t write anything convincingly about this at all. I called my friend Gregg Hurwitz who’s an extraordinary writer who also writes for comics and I said, my character is a graphic novelist. He said, why? I said, I don’t know. He said, I know who you have to talk to.
He put me in touch with Jud Meyer who owns a place, Blast Off Comics, in North Hollywood. Jud totally opened the door for me. I did a lot of research on how to write a graphic novel, how to publish a graphic novel, and you can read a lot, but you really have to find somebody to talk to. You can’t get that full breadth of knowledge without anecdotal stories and details and feelings. Not only did Jud send me a stack of graphic novels to read, he spent a lot of time on the phone with me talking about what this form of storytelling had meant to him as a kid when he fell in love with it, why he’s still in love with it. That conversation alone was the doorway that opened up Ian for me in a lot of ways.
AD: You wrote in the book’s acknowledgements about the many comics which your daughter wants to read and you will not let her.
LU: [laughs] She still hovers around my bookshelf and I’m like, not yet. Some of it’s very dark.
AD: I would imagine that to help craft Ian, you weren’t binge reading My Little Pony comics.
LU: No, not too many My Little Pony comics. [laughs]
AD: So what’s next for you?
LU: I’m at work on my next novel and that’s close to being complete. I’m also at work on a YA novel, but those are works in progress so not too much to say about those yet. They’re both underway for 2016.
AD: Are you planning to return to The Hollows? Or to Ian and Megan?
LU: I’ll definitely be dwelling in The Hollows for a while. At least until I figure out exactly what it wants. [laughs] It wants something. When I figure out what that is, maybe I’ll move on, but until then, I’ll be dwelling there.