A free sample short story from The Devil and Leo Persky
I used to be a writer and editor for Weekly World News, the fake news supermarket tabloid that chronicled such phenomena as Bat Boy, Big Foot, alien babies, and Elvis sightings. The job of a WWN writer was to think up crazy shit and write a couple of hundred humorous words on it because, of course, everything we published was fake…except for the disclaimer in six-point type at the bottom of page three that confessed we were just funnin’ you for entertainment purposes.
I missed WWN when it folded in 2007. Not only was it a great day job where I got to work with a small staff of friends (including fellow Crazy 8’er Bob Greenberger), but writing those wacky articles was fun. It was all about starting with a premise loosely based on reality; an idle thought about what happened to the rest of the rabbits whose feet were used to make good luck charms, I wrote an article about the disabled surviving hares bringing class action lawsuits against rabbit’s foot manufacturers. I turned historical speculation about Abraham Lincoln’s mental health into a story in which he was a straitjacketed lunatic. Anything and everything was fodder for a WWN story.
A couple of years later, I was invited to contribute a short story to a horror anthology with a vampire theme. In search of a protagonist, I eventually hit on the thought of making him a reporter for WWN, but not exactly myWWN. Instead, this version of the paper existed in a world where every single word it published was true, from aliens to zombies. I’ll admit, there was a tinge of Carl Kolchak of The Night Stalker fame in my thinking, but considering the extreme wackiness of the average Weekly World News stories, I wanted to inject a lot more humor into the character and the stories. At first, I was leaning towards someone modeled after a fictitious WWN “contributor,” Matthew Daemon, the creation of the real WWN contributor, the late Dick Siegel, and star of the comic strip I had commissioned in my editorial capacity from Mike Collins.
Matthew Daemon was your typical big, strong, trench coat- and slouch-hat-wearing supernatural adventurer. But, as dad-bodied Kolchak proved, big and strong isn’t as funny as an ordinary guy, and if an ordinary guy was funny, a little nebbish guy was even funnier. Yeah, I’m looking at you, pre-Interiors Woody Allen!
So with Woody and Arnold Stang (a comic actor best known as the voice of Top Cat and for his role in 1970’s Hercules in New York), I went total nebbish and found Leo Persky there waiting for me. Recognizing that at 47 years old and “five foot seven, 142 pounds, glasses, and a spreading bald spot that’s got me to wearing a hat,” he wasn’t the most imposing authority figure, Leo, a third generation monster hunter, has adopted the name and photograph of his strapping, imposing grandfather Terrence Strange for professional use.
“Man Bites Dog” was the result, and even before I was finished with the first story, I knew this wouldn’t be the last time I visited with Leo Persky. In fact, I went back to Leo and his world of genies, aliens, and snake-gods, five more times, including a story starring Leo’s Mom, the little old tough-as-nails septuagenarian Barbara in another vampiric encounter, “Come In, Sit Down, Have a Bite” for the Crazy 8 anthology Bad Ass Moms. And then, because I still wanted to play some more with Leo, the novella, “The Devil and Leo Persky.” And I have a feeling I’m still not done with him!
But look, you don’t have to take my word about how much fun Leo is. I’ve posted “Man Bites Dog” in its entirety over on my website as a free sample that will hopefully whet your appetite for more. As Leo says, “The government learned a long time ago that the best way to keep a secret was to tell it to everyone…because only the nutjobs are ever going to ask in the first place.”
Or as former Weekly World News managing editor Sal Ivon once famously said, “If someone calls me up and says their toaster is talking to them, I don’t refer them to professional help, I say, ‘Put the toaster on the phone’.”
Mel Brooks summed up my feelings about life in the title song of his film, The Twelve Chairs: “Hope for the best, expect the worst.”
In The Devil and Leo Persky, you’ll meet Leo Persky, the living embodiment of that philosophy. Under the penname “Terrance Strange” (the earlier pseudonym of his grandfather Jacob, himself a monster-hunter and journalist of the weird), Leo is a columnist for World Weekly News, a supermarket tabloid of the supernatural and strange in a world where every Bat Boy, Bigfoot, alien baby, Satan visiting, Elvis sighting story is the truth. A world where vampires exist, magic is real, and extraterrestrial visitations routine.
What you may not know about me is, I was once a reporter for Weekly World News (1979 – 2007), the black and white tabloid that billed itself as “the world’s only reliable newspaper.” There was truth in that statement; you could rely on virtually every word in it to be made up, excluding the trivia column and the 6-point type warning at the bottom of page two that virtually every word in it was made up and suggesting readers suspend their belief for the sake of enjoyment. From 2005 to 2007, I wrote close to 100 bylined stories for the paper, as well as ghost writing at least that many more under the names of our numerous fictitious columnists ranging from “Miss Adventure, the Gayest American Hero” to “Ed Anger” to “Lester the Typing Horse” and “Sammy the Chatting Chimp” once I was on staff as Executive Editor from February 2006 to the end in August 2007.
In 2010, I was asked to contribute to an anthology about vampires. At first, my thinking went down the more traditional road of dark, angsty tales of cursed people, but I was having a hard time tapping into the necessary melodrama of the situation. Horror had never really my cup of tea; the tame, old timey black and white horror movies I grew up on from the 1930s to the 1950s weren’t really all that horrifying, and, in fact, looking back at them with modern eyes, are pretty campy and funny. And the modern blood-spurty “don’t go in the basement” kind are all formula and no surprise. Comic book horror stories of the time were equally lame, published under a code that prohibited every single horror trope imaginable. The only time I’ve ever really been frightened by horror was the moment in the 1963 Twilight Zone episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” when William Shatner lifts the window shade to find the face of the gremlin staring in at him. My brothers and I jumped, screaming as one, and slept with the lights on that night. I was 8 years old.
I did a lot of stories about the supernatural for the News… I even wrote a multi-part tie-in/crossover story with the CW-TV show Supernatural! There wasn’t a serious bone in the body of any one of any of those articles. So when I needed a horror story, I decided to go at it from the angle of a reporter for a tabloid in the aforementioned world where all this stuff was true. And because I’m a wiseass, I made my reporter one too because, you know, it makes writing dialogue that much easier. Write what you know, they say, so I also made him kind of a nebbish. And 5’ 7”.
I had so much fun with Leo in that first story that I returned to him five times for further adventures over the next decade (well, technically four, since one of the stories, another vampire tale, “Come in, Sit Down, Have a Bite,” stars Leo’s mom, Barbara, herself a retired monster-hunter), including in stories for the Crazy 8 anthologies Bad Ass Moms, Love, Murder, Mayhem, and Thrilling Adventure Yarns 2021. Those 6 stories and an all-new 27,000-word novella are now available as The Devil and Leo Persky, all under a sterling cover by my buddy, artist/poet/performer/mensch/designer Rick Stasi. And speaking of old friends, at the made-up World Weekly News, Leo Persky’s editor is Rob Greenberg, a highly fictionalized take on fellow Crazy 8’er Bob Greenberger (not a vampire!), who had been the Weekly World News’ managing editor with me.
I start off writing every story hoping for the best but expecting the worst. Some I have to chase all over the damned place before I finally find the story I had been trying to write from the start, believing without doubt that I’d spend countless days and thousands of wasted words before having to abandon the effort as hopeless. But Leo has never given me a moment’s doubt. I didn’t usually have any more of an idea where a Leo story was headed than I did with those that gave me trouble, but I always knew he would get me there, sooner or later, snarky wisecracks and all.
The Devil and Leo Perskyis now available on Amazon in paperback and eBook.
“The Case of the Missing Alien Baby Mama” is my fourth outing with Leo Persky, “a solid five foot seven, one hundred and forty-two pounds of average, complete with glasses, too much nose, not enough chin, and a spreading bald spot that I swear isn’t the reason I always wear a hat.”
Leo was born in 2008, when I was invited to contribute a short story to an anthology published by Moonstone Books. I’d dabbled in horror before, but in that broody-meant-to-chilling kind of way, so I wanted to do something a little different this time around. That I had been, up until several months earlier, a writer for and executive editor of the fake news humor tabloid Weekly World News probably had a lot to do with my decision to take a little tongue-in-cheek poke at the conventions of the form.
So Leo Perksy, under the penname of Terrance Strange and a picture of his much more photogenic grandfather, is an investigative reporter for WWN. In Leo’s world, everything the News prints, from ghost stories to interviews with alien visitors is the one hundred percent, fact-checked and verified truth. And to say that Leo views his world through jaundiced eyes would be an understatement; Leo is a proud, self-proclaimed snarky asshole because, well, everybody always tells me I should write what I know.
Two more Leo stories followed “Man Bites Dog,” “Vodka Martini, Straight Up, Hold the Jinn” (2012) and “Shunning the Frumious Bandersnatch” (2014), both for horror anthologies.* Then, in 2016 came Russ Colchamiro’s call for stories for the Love, Murder, and Mayhem anthology we’re doing through Crazy 8 Press. Russ had only one rule: “Each story within the SciFi realm must contain at least one component of love or romance, and at least one murder. Mayhem always welcome.”
Funny he should say that, because after finishing “Shunning the Frumious Bandersnatch,” I realized that all three of Leo’s stories had supernatural elements—vampires, genies, and Atlantean magic—and I hoped that in the next outing, I could do something with those other staples of WWN headlines, alien visitations and interspecies progeny, especially human/alien hybrid babies. Within twenty-four hours of Russ’s email invite, we had an approved pitch for “The Case of the Missing Alien Baby Mama.”
And now that alien baby is about to be born, an adorable little tale complete with the requisite love and murder, as well as its fair share of mayhem. As just one of the parents of this beautiful, bouncing newborn book, I couldn’t be prouder.
Love, Murder & Mayhem from Crazy 8 Press will be on sale both in print and digital formats in July. Stay tuned for updates!
(By the way, if you’re unfamiliar with the “real” Weekly World News or want to revisit that funny old friend, you’ll find an archive of back issues online.
You can follow Paul at PaulKupperberg.com and on Facebook and Twitter. He is a member of Crazy 8 Press.
The cake from my going away party at DC Comics when I left to join WWN.
A bunch of years ago, my friend Joe Gentile of Moonstone Books asked me to contribute a short story to an anthology called Vampires: Dracula and the Undead Legions. Out of that came a story called “Man Bites Dog,” starring Weekly World News reporter Leo Persky, better known to his readers as “Terrance Strange.” (“My real name is Leo Persky. But ‘Terrance Strange’ sounds like he’d be a big, strapping adventurer who travels the world seeking out the dangerous and, yes, the strange, while Leo Persky sounds like a middle aged, five foot, seven inch tall balding and bespectacled Jew who cowers at the slightest sign of danger. Seeing as how I am the latter but would rather readers believe I’m the former, I go with the macho name, not to mention a photograph at the top of my column of my paternal grandfather, Jacob Persky, who also used the nom de bizarre of “Strange” but who actually was a big, strapping adventurer who traveled the world seeking out the dangerous. Unfortunately, I take after my mother’s side of the family. Scrawny and whiney.”)
Weekly World News was a real publication–I was Executive Editor for its last year and a half of existence, along with Managing Editor, pal, and Crazy 8 colleague Bob Greenberger–even if everything we published was false. It was a great gig, and I thought it would be fun to write a character who inhabited a world in which WWN was a journal of truth, although a majority of its readers still believed it was all fake. I was right. It was fun. Here’s an excerpt from the third Leo story, “Shunning the Frumious Bandersnatch,” which you can read in its entirety, along with the other Leo stories, if you’re interested, in my Crazy 8 Press short story collection, In My Shorts: Hitler’s Bellhop and Other Stories.
My mirror misery began with Rob Berger, as is true of most of the woes life has chosen to inflict on me. Berger, the size of a grizzly bear, almost as furry, and about twice as ferocious, was the night editor of the News. It was a position for which he was uniquely suited insofar as it kept him separated from the vast majority of the staff who worked the day shift and who speculated that exposure to sunlight would cause him to disintegrate into a heap of dust. He was, to put it kindly, not exactly a people person.
In fact, I have some question as to whether he’s any kind of person at all, but as I rely upon him for my livelihood I was content to give him the benefit of the doubt. For all his flaws ⎯ and they were legion ⎯ he was a hell of an editor. Sure, he motivated through the twin tactics of fear and intimidation, but he knew how to cut to the heart of a story…as well as how to cut the heart out of a reporter who didn’t deliver on an assignment. The fact that I had survived under his despotic reign longer than any other reporter, since my humble beginnings as a wide-eyed and bushy tailed stringer while still in college, I considered myself one of his favorites. Which just meant that he was happy to allow me to continue to draw breath, as long as I was in some form of constant pain and/or discomfort. If by some fluke convergence of karma and good luck I happened not to be in either state, Berger could always be counted on to throw something my way to send me plunging back into the fiery pits of misery.
“So, what do you know about mirrors?” my esteemed editor growled even as my foot crossed the threshold into his den.
“That they’ve yet to make one that won’t crack under your beatific scowl?” I said, hazarding a guess and risking a large, heavy object being hurled at my skull.
He must have been in a benevolent mood because all he did was curse me and several generations of my ancestors for a general lack of intelligence and dubious paternity before saying, “Don’t you read your own goddamned newspaper? I mean the Mirror of the Third City, you moron.”
I swept to the floor the stack of books, manuscripts, and old editions piled on his single visitors chair that he kept there to discourage anyone from sitting down and staying any longer than was necessary.
“Uh-uh, and I’m supposed to know what you mean because I became a mind-reader exactly when?”
“Around the time I emailed the background material to the smart phone this company pays a fortune to supply you with and which you’re supposed to have always switched on and check regularly for such items as emailed background material on things like the Mirror of the Third City, that’s when.”
I sat down.
“Oh. That Mirror of the Third City.”
He did what he did best and glowered at me.
“Who the hell said you could sit down?”
“May I?”
“Yeah. Have a seat. And answer my question.”
“Uh, you see, the phone fell in the toilet and…”
“Not that question, schmuck. The mirror.”
“Legendary ancient Atlantean artifact from the reign of Turmerac the Elder, made with sand from the shores of the Eternal Sea and silver smelted from the soul of his mother-in-law, Calthandra, who he had cast into the fire pits of Darkworld as punishment for conspiring with his son, Turmerac the Younger, to overthrow him in league with, what’s his name? The one-eyed king of the Gem City?”
“Rubic the Obese.”
“Yeah, that’s the one. Papa Turmerac had his royal sorcerer whip up the mirror to entrap sonny’s soul in eternal torment on the razor-edge between this world and Darkworld because, I guess, even he wasn’t cruel enough to have thought of sending the kid to work for you.”
Berger elevated his left eyebrow a quarter of an inch, his version of a sardonic laugh. The only thing that elicited true laughter from him was human misery. Preferably mine.
“I would’ve taught the little bastard the meaning of loyalty, that’s for sure.”
“No doubt. Hell, that’s why you won’t ever catch me conspiring with any one-eyed fat guys against you.”
“Good call. Make sure you keep it that way.”
“So why the sudden interest in a mirror that no one’s seen since about 12,000 B.C. anyway?”
“Because, if you’d read my email, you’d know that it’s turned up again.”
That got my attention.
“No shit? Where?”
“On an episode of ‘The Antique Bazaar,’ shot in Lubbock, Texas. The idiot appraiser lied and told the owner it was a nineteenth century Art Nouveau design, worth maybe a few hundred bucks, and then tried to buy it from the guy after the taping.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh is right. The precious stones set into the frame are worth a few million alone, but the mirror itself is priceless…and deadly to anyone whose lies and deceit are reflected in its surface.”
“So the appraiser’s now sharing bunk space in hell with Turmerac, Junior?”
“Yeah, although you’ve got to admit, that’s a fitting punishment for anybody from a reality TV show.”
I couldn’t argue with that, but, as appealing as was the image of Honeybooboo and her clan and all their Jersey shore, motorcycle building, gold mining, storage unit buying ilk writhing on the devil’s pitchfork, I let it go in favor of journalistic inquiry.
“Okay, and then what happened?”
“Then a dwarf warrior with a sword stepped out of the mirror, cut off the lying antique dealer’s head, fought off a couple of freaked out security guards, then took off into the night with the mirror.”
“Gee, you’d think something like that would’ve warranted at least a mention in the local news.”
“It did. Only the authorities told a slightly altered version that fits better with accepted reality and local sensibilities. They blame the attack on a meth crazed illegal Mexican immigrant wielding a fireplace poker that he grabbed from a set brought in for appraisal by a gay couple from Amarillo.”
“Suus ‘facillimus ut sit credere quod suus’ facillimus ut credere,” I said with a shrug of rabbinical proportion.
Rob didn’t miss a beat. “It’s easiest to believe what’s easiest to believe,” he translated, then fixed me with a stare. “Two Jews who know Latin, go figure. Your mission, Persky, like I give a crap whether you decide to accept it or not…”
“Find the mirror,” I said, jumping in on the obvious cue.
“And make it quick, will you?”
“What’s the rush? You’ve got five days until the next issue closes.” I had taken out my smart phone and turned it on so I could get at my email. I’m not as such user friendly in that I’m not a friendly user. I don’t trust technology. Technology is just what we call the magic and alchemy of our age. Instead of witches and bubbling cauldrons, we now have scientists, engineers, and manufacturing to turn our thoughts and desires into something real for personal or political gain. And the magic, no matter what you called it throughout history was, though often triumphant, always corrupted. The Atlanteans called theirs “manna.”
“The rush is, numbskull, people are dying!”
In My Shorts: Hitler’s Bellhop and Other Stories is available:
