About Every Hunter Is Hunted: From the world of Barry Lyga’s New York Times bestselling I Hunt Killers trilogy comes a thrilling adult mystery about the hunt for a monstrous serial killer. Released June 23rd 2026.

Nostalgia, man.

It’s a powerful thing. Even when we try to resist its song, the damn thing becomes an earworm. And lately I’ve been wondering: Is it possible to feel nostalgia for something you yourself created?

The notion of nostalgia is usually targeted at something we remember from our youth, something that was created and aimed at us generationally, if not individually. That Nintendo Power Glove. Christopher Reeve’s knowing smile. The opening notes of the “Imperial March.” The startup chime on your first Mac. The theme song to that sitcom you watched endlessly.

I’m no stranger to the tug and the lure of nostalgia. My office is cluttered with shelves of toys and books from my childhood. My attic is crammed with long boxes of old comic books. And my media server is stuffed with, among other things, old episodes of Super Friends and Looney Toons cartoons that, let’s face, I’ll probably never watch again.

But it’s nice having it all, right?

A while ago — forever, it sometimes seems — I wrote a trilogy and a series of prequel short stories collectively known as I Hunt Killers, the story of Jasper Dent, teen son of a notorious serial killer. It was, in the words of Daniel Kraus, my attempt to “craft the most serious (and bloodiest) crime series yet for teen readers.” The common consensus is that I succeeded. The series wrapped up in 2014.

Killers was, without a doubt, the most successful book of my career. It landed me on the New York Times bestsellers list and to this day, I still get requests to blurb “dark YA.” When I typed the last words of the last book, I felt like I was finished.

But something funny happened.

I started to miss Jasper. I started to miss his traumatized, blood-drenched world. I missed living in his skin, seeing the world through his monumentally messed-up perceptions.

It felt strange to be nostalgic for something I had created. But eventually, just like that Lightning Lad action figure I really didn’t need to buy, I had to do it. I had to go back.

The end of the Killers series saw seventeen-year-old Jasper come to a final reckoning with his monstrous father and learn the truth about his missing mother, a truth that nearly destroys him. I began to wonder what Jasper might be like today. How had the traumas of his life informed his maturation? What was he like as a twentysomething, no longer a kid? How had he changed?

Had he changed?

It was sort of a crazy idea, honestly. YA is YA and adult fiction is adult fiction, and while occasionally a successful adult series might spin off a kid-friendly version, I was unaware of any story that had done the opposite — a YA series aging up, keeping pace with its readers.

Growing up. Looking forward.

And maybe, just maybe, the occasional look back. For nostalgia, you know.

I started tentatively, poking around the edges of a new tale. Jasper Dent, isolated by choice, living the life of a shut-in, forsaking both the fame and the infamy the world bestowed upon him. Doing his level best to cope with the bespoke horror-show of his past.

In deep, intensive therapy.

An unlikely hero. Maybe not even a hero at all, any more. I wasn’t sure.

One day, not knowing what I was working on, my agent said to me, “You know, I think it’s time.” I had to laugh; I wasn’t the only one in the grip of nostalgia.

But the story couldn’t just be nostalgia. Sure, I would want to put in references and little rewards for those who’d been there from the beginning, but I knew that this had to be a new story that stood on its own. A tale for any audience that would come to it.

The book that resulted — EVERY HUNTER IS HUNTED, out on June 23 — was a forceful blend of new and old, triumph and tragedy. Everything you need is in the book, but of course if you’ve read the YA series, you’ll see textures and shadings that others will miss.

So, not nostalgia after all, even if that’s how it began in my head. An entirely new story. The start of a new world.

For those of you new to Jasper Dent and his world, I say: Welcome.

For those of you, like me, coming back for a new hit of an old pleasure, I say: Welcome back.

The post Not Just Nostalgia (But a Little Nostalgia Never Hurt, Right?) appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

We chat with Barry about his new duology Edited and Unedited, along with writing, book recommendations, and more!

Hi, Barry! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?

I always feel like the most interesting thing about me is my books, so I inevitably disappoint readers when I talk about myself because I’m basically just a boring suburban dad who cloisters himself in his office whenever possible to conjure weird worlds. I’ve been lucky that the stuff I dream up has captured other people’s imaginations for a decade and a half now! I started out way back in 2006 with The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy & Goth Girl and now here we are, twenty-six books later. Yeah, I sort of can’t believe it either!

But the basics: Grew up in cow country (rural Maryland). Went to Yale. Worked in the comic book industry and was instrumental in making Free Comic Book Day happen. Now I write books and cross my fingers that someone out there will like them.

When did you first discover your love for writing?

I have a very strong memory of being six or seven years old and my grandmother asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. And I said “A writer!” Why did I say that? What made me think that was possible or even a job you could aspire to? I HAVE NO IDEA! But somehow I stuck to that idea and made it happen. You’re welcome, 7-year-old me.

Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!

Harold and the Purple Crayon

The Girl with the Silver Eyes, probably

Replay by Ken Grimwood

Your experimental YA duology, Edited and Unedited, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

get sometimes can messy writing

What can readers expect?

Craziness! God himself dabbling in the story! A world in decline, desperate to survive! Words and punctuation and the meaning of reality! Chapter 16! What more do you want???

Where did the inspiration for the unique duology come from?

Well, the first inspiration was for UNEDITED itself, which has its origins decades past, when I was in college. I was taking a literature class that posited that the Sherlock Holmes mysteries taught readers how to read them. I liked this idea and I thought about a book that could teach you how to write it.

It took decades, but I eventually got around to writing it. My editor looked at it and said, “This book is long and crazy. Let’s make it longer and crazier.” And he suggested publishing an expurgated version — EDITED — at the same time. It was one of those moments where you find yourself convulsing in laughter at the sheer lunacy of it. Sure, the book is more than 200,000 words long and REALLY WEIRD, so let’s make it EVEN WEIRDER with a second book that tells the same story…but not really the same story.

I thought it was an absolutely insane idea, so of course I said “Yes!”

Can you tell us a bit about the challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?

I know this will sound unbelievable, but when writing UNEDITED, I didn’t really face much in the way of challenges! It’s so long and weird, but somehow my brain has evolved the utterly pointless ability to hold the whole damn thing in my head. I just wrote and wrote and wrote.

With EDITED, the big challenge was “What do you cut? What do you keep? What do you change?” My editor took the first whack at it and he used a machete on it, cutting out whole swaths of the story — scenes, characters, etc. Then he went through and patched it up and handed it off to me for my thoughts. My first reaction was “I need to add everything back in!!!” But of course, that’s not the point of EDITED. So I tried to rise to the challenge of figuring out how to assemble it into a NEW  story that worked on its own, while still being faithful to UNEDITED. Readers will decide if I succeeded!

Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?

I’m going to be a bit coy to avoid spoilers, but there’s a very uncomfortable death for a character towards the end of the book that I found very satisfying. And there’s a guy called the Electrostatic Man who only appears in UNEDITED — I invented him more than thirty years ago and finally put him in a book! I had fun writing him.

What’s next for you?

I’m…not sure! I took a little time off writing to focus on my kids (see above about being a boring suburban dad!), so there will be a little caesura before the next Lyga book. Which is appropriate, really, because I just dropped two books on you and one of them is 800 pages!

I can say that I’m working on a thriller and a couple of graphic novel ideas, so we’ll see what pops.

Lastly, what have been some of your favourite 2022 reads? Any 2023 releases our readers should look out for?

I’m not sure about 2023 yet, but you gotta read THE GETAWAY by Lamar Giles. Holy BLEEPING BLEEP, what a great book!

You can find me at barrylyga.com and @barrylyga on Twitter (if Twitter still exists by the time this sees print).

Will you be checking out Edited and Unedited? Tell us in the comments below!

The post Q&A: Barry Lyga, Author of ‘Edited’ and ‘Unedited’ appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

Releasing on November 15th from Blackstone Publishing, this hilarious meta-love story is a beautiful mediation on love in all forms, including an author’s love for his characters. Edited is also publishing simultaneously with Unedited—an experimental release of the unedited version of original novel.

Read on to discover the cover and synopsis with Edited now available for pre-order.

Boy meets girl; boy loves girl; boy stupidly loses girl; boy goes to the ends of the universe in desperate attempt to get girl back. Meanwhile: author writes book.

DON’T READ THIS BOOK!

Put it down. Back away. Go read another book, one titled Unedited. Because that’s the one you want to read. It’s super-long and it’s got everything in this book, but more of it. More crazy. More pages. More words. More heft.

Or … go ahead and read this one. It probably won’t hurt you. Probably.

On its surface, this is the story of a boy—Mike—and the girl he loses. It’s the story of how he swears to do anything and everything to get her back.

It’s also the story of a world going to ruin, a world like our own, but seen through a very warped and cracked mirror.

It’s also the story of a story, a story told only in flashes and excerpts and summaries, a story that contains clues that could fix this broken world or end it once and for all.

It’s social satire and desperate longing for love and metafiction and alternate worlds … It’s about the power of love and the power of writing and—more importantly—about the limits on them both.

It’s about architecture and editing. How you build things. How you tear them down. Or tear them apart.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barry Lyga is the author of The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl, Boy Toy, Goth Girl Rising, and the I Hunt Killers series, among others. He lives in New York City. Or Baltimore. Or New Jersey. Or, possibly, Edinburgh. Or somewhere he hasn’t imagined yet. It all depends on when you’re reading this book. In fact, he might not live in any of those places, or he could even be dead by now.

The post Exclusive Cover Reveal: Edited by Barry Lyga appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

The Legends of Tomorrow are on the Waverider somewhere in space, while The Green Arrow and The Flash are keeping Star City and Central City safe until there is a breach and metahumans from another earth are coming through. Of course, none of them are playing for the Heroes team. The metas from Earth 27 are the opposite of Earth 1, which is our world. The good guys are evil and the bad guys are good. Central City is now full of speedsters and guys like Ultraman, whose power are similar to Superman and Kryptonite cannot harm him it actually powers him up. To have the slightest chance to defeat them, Barry needs help from Green Arrow and his team.

Since Arrow has aired, I am now somewhat less faithful to the Arrowverse because I do not like some developments they made on screen lately. Reading this book and imagining the actors was quite fun and the novel refers to events that have just taken place in the last couple season of The Flash and Arrow so it feels like a little refresher.

Still, the book stands on its own and should not be mixed up with the TV shows. Using the multiverse, the book tells the story of another Barry who did not create Flashpoint. Ray explains it on the first couple of pages and later Cisco tells Team Flash about his monthly conversation with himself from the other timeline.

For the 250 something pages, there were quite a few different storylines moving forward at the same time. While Barry and his team work together with half of Oliver and his Green Arrow Team in Central City, Jo helps in Star City with a well-known Bee Lady. I would have loved to get to know more about the shortly introduced Madam Xanadu who is not a meta but uses real magic!

What I really liked was that everyone has a bad doppelgänger and that even the noble Bruce Wayne has one and the “…to be continued” sounds like we will have quite a lot of him in the next instalment in which Barry and Oliver gets help from Supergirl to defeat Anti-Matter Man, a weapon used in an invasion of the positive matter universe, a power that even its creator fears it.

Some time ago, I had the pleasure of reading Bang by Barry Lyga, which is an entirely different and more mature story. Let me tell you, no matter which book you will pick up by him, you will not be disappointed. No matter what he writes, you going to love it!

The Flash: Green Arrow’s Perfect Shot is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.

Will you be picking up The Flash: Green Arrow’s Perfect Shot? Tell us in the comments below!

Synopsis | Goodreads

It’s the crossover event fans have been waiting for, as The Flash joins forces with Green Arrow!

When the Green Arrow needs help tracking down a sinister bomber in Star City, speedster Barry Allen is out the door in a flash. But as The Flash saves the day with his friends on Team Arrow, a huge dimensional rift appears over his hometown of Central City—and thousands of refugees with superspeed come pouring out. Can the combined skills of Team Arrow and The Flash’s friends at S.T.A.R. Labs manage the chaos long enough to stop the rift from tearing their universe apart? This exciting first installment in the new crossover trilogy promises to be one of the most action-packed reads of the season. Supergirl, Superman, and the heroes from DC’s Legends of Tomorrow will be joining in on the fun in books two and three of this can’t-miss trilogy.

The post Review: ‘The Flash: Green Arrow’s Perfect Shot’ by Barry Lyga appeared first on The Nerd Daily.