The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon a wickedly funny dark humor horror novel that blends supernatural horror with a thrilling murder mystery by Barry Maher Book Tour with Q&A and Guest Post

There are stories that terrify with monsters, and stories that terrify with truth. This novel does both. The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon is a supernatural thriller steeped in atmosphere, laced with dark humor, and set in a time when the shadows seemed closer and the dangers harder to escape. For readers who crave suspense that is as unsettling as it is entertaining, this one offers a ride into places most of us would rather not go.

The year is 1982. Steve Witowski is a failed songwriter and fugitive whose life takes a disastrous turn when he saves Victoria from a violent assault. That one reckless act pulls him into her world, and into the sinister history of the crumbling church she has just purchased. Beneath its rotting beams lie secrets—rituals, crypts, and a desperate demon that grows stronger by the day. Steve is certain it’s all delusion, a nightmare he can explain away. But as visions close in, as blood-soaked revelations surface, and as the face of the man he once killed begins to appear on his own skin, denial becomes impossible. Darkly funny, horrifyingly inventive, and pulsing with suspense, this is a story where the line between reality and nightmare collapses—and survival comes at a cost.

Barry Maher has lived a life as unconventional as his fiction. He’s been a poet whose award was five Xeroxed copies of a literary journal, a journalist with bylines across the country, and a man who once literally lived on the beach, sand and seagulls included. Later he became an international speaker, telling stories to audiences around the world, his client list a Who’s Who of major corporations and associations. His syndicated column Slightly Off-Kilter showcased his darkly comic wit, while his work has been featured everywhere from The New York Times and USA Today to his personal favorite, Funeral Service Insider. He’s also made appearances on The Today Show, CNN, and CNBC. Learn more on his website or connect with him on Facebook.

Amazon: https://bit.ly/41Vv4a6

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/239608581-the-great-dick

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.” 

SUNDAY, MARCH 21, 1982

Two Women and One Corpse

“Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to lie well.”

                                                                                        —Samuel Johnson

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 a 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.

Guest Post:

Where Do You Get Your Ideas from?

A while back, 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 session, 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 Citizen Kane or a nice rom/com or a few episodes of Seinfeld. Instead I 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.

Author Q&A:

Writing Process & Creativity

How did you research your book? 

Google is my friend. Though my friend is getting weird. Usually I’m looking for a single fact. For example: “What was the name of the shade of hair dye Ronald Reagan used?” AI unfortunately has given Google an imagination. So now, rather than getting the fact I requested, I get some kind of story. For Reagan’s hair dye, I got 80 people debating whether or not he dyed his hair. Of course he didn’t. As Gerald Ford said, it was just “prematurely orange.”

What’s the hardest scene or character you wrote—and why?

In The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon, the most difficult character to write may have been Jonathan O’Ryan. In a way that was because he was the easiest. He kept taking over the scene instead of letting it go where I expected it to go. Fortunately, it turned out he was right. He stole virtually every scene he was in, and made the book funnier and better. 

Where do you get your ideas?

Spain.

On request, I’ll send you a longer piece on the bizarre origin of the idea for The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon. It involves Asia, chainsaws and $410 baseball caps.

What sets your book apart from others in your genre?

It’s all contained in the title, The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon. In the book, a character on LSD explains that The Great Gatsby, a novel about tragic love, and Moby Dick, a novel about a gigantic whale, are basically the same story, just worked out differently to fit their different eras. He says that if someone writes that story today, they should call it, of course, The Great Dick. (Or, I suppose Moby Gatsby.)

Just so you don’t have to read the Great Gatsby—or, God forbid, Moby Dick—they and The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon are all about the struggle to overcome a failure that’s threatening to overwhelm someone’s life. Only one of the books however reeks of fish.

If you want to know about the dysfunctional demon, you’ll have to read the whole book. But you can skip The Great Gatsby and Moby Dick. 

What helps you overcome writer’s block?

I sit my butt down in my chair and write. I have to turn out a syndicated column every week. I don’t have time for writer’s block. Besides, writing—even bad writing—gets the juices flowing and cures writer’s block. Maybe I’ll have to throw away a paragraph or two or even a couple of pages. But I write through the block and come out the other side into a world of creativity and sunshine and roses and—at least in my case—dysfunctional demons.

What’s your favorite compliment you’ve received as a writer? 

My all-time favorite compliment—or complaint or both—was as a speaker. An attendee came up to me after a session and said, “It’s really true that you can’t judge a book by its cover. You were fantastic!”

My favorite compliment as a writer came from the great Gayle Lynds, New York Times bestselling author of Masquerade and The Assassins. It was the first author endorsement I received on The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon. Gayle wrote: “What a page turner! Witty, literate, scary, sexy, and powerfully evocative . . . Barry Maher is a brilliant new talent”

Fortunately, the book received fourteen other raves from prominent authors, most of them bestselling authors. They all meant a lot. But the first was the most exciting.

Your Writing Life

Do you write every day? What’s your schedule?

Yes, I write every day. I get up, eat breakfast, sit down and write until lunch. After lunch I write until dinner. After dinner, I enjoy what others have written.

Where do you write—home, coffee shop, train?

When I was speaking full time I wrote everywhere, on planes, in hotel rooms, in taxis. Now I usually write at home. I sit where I can look out over Santa Barbara, the ocean and the beach that was once the only bedroom I could afford. I’ve been very lucky.

 

Any quirky writing rituals or must-have snacks?

As long as I have my laptop, I’m all set. I wrote my first novel on a typewriter. I used so much white-out to keep from having to retype whole pages that I’d practically hallucinate. If I had to give up my computer and write on a typewriter again, I’d become a rodeo clown. 

Incidentally my pal, Google, says that the effects of sniffing White-Out on the brain “range from short-term intoxication to permanent neurological damage and death.” Request my article, Where Do You Get Your Ideas from? for the bizarre story of my brain tumor and The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon. 

Behind the Book

Why did you choose this setting/topic?

The decaying church with a sordid past arrived with the story. It fit the mood perfectly. And the story in that setting scared the hell out of me. Of course it may have helped that someone was applying a power saw to my skull at the time.

If your book became a movie, who would star in it?

Timothée Chalamet would be an excellent choice. Still, if someone was willing to make The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon into a movie, I’d also accept Danny DeVito, Sandra Bullock or Donald Duck. 

Which author(s) most inspired you?

Marcel Proust soundproofed his bedroom walls with cork and wrote lying in bed.  I’d love to do both. As far as writing however, I could never even dream of touching his genius. Plus where would I find an editor who’d okay a fifty page paragraph on waking up in the morning. Nowadays those fifty pages would become “I woke and . . .” They wouldn’t even get a full sentence. 

Fun & Lighthearted Qs

What’s your go-to comfort food?

Puffs. I’m not sure exactly what they are. But they’re some grain blown up and probably salted. It’s like eating flavored air.

What are you binge-watching right now?

The West Wing. This is a reader participation answer. Fill in your own comment.

If you could time-travel, where would you go?

First, I’d want to make absolutely sure I could get back. Things are strange now, but I have a feeling that, in the Western World at least, we may have just lived through the best era that humanity has ever experienced. I just hope it doesn’t remain the best era humanity has ever experienced. I’m hoping that soon we’ll all have reason to once again believe in continual progress.

What 3 books would you bring to a desert island?

Remembrance of Things Past. It would be good to finally finish it. And at 1,267,000 words (thanks, Google) not only would it last a while, but it’s well worth re-reading. Also The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, the last two, yet un-finished volumes of The Song of Ice and Fire, the Game of Thrones series. Marcel Proust and George R. R. Martin: two great writers who couldn’t be less alike.

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