Paranormal Payback

Introduction

by Jim Butcher

People can be terrible.

We’ve all known someone like that. Someone who just doesn’t seem to understand where the lines are, or who doesn’t respect them even when they’re pointed out. People who are thoughtless or careless to a harmful degree. People who are just…well. Stupid.

People who wrong us.

Figuring out how to respond to being wronged is the subject of a whole lot of human life.

Religion, law, war, philosophy, violence—even art—are all facets of human beings figuring how to respond to being wronged.

There is, in all of us, a need to see the scales balanced, if not for ourselves, then for others whom we see being wronged. It’s innate.

From that common starting point, things diverge wildly. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, is one response. Taking back sevenfold what was stolen is another. Answering for ill action with one’s money, freedom, or life is still another.

But we all have the same base idea: when the world is out of balance, we want it righted.

The first problem with that desire is our limited perspective.

When we’ve been hurt, or seen others hurt, there’s anger, and anger can make it hard to see when things are balanced again.

Jurisprudence has been trying to figure that one out across the whole of human civilization for thousands of years.

The second problem is that every single one of us has wronged someone else, somewhere, sometime. We’re flawed. Or sometimes broken. Or sometimes blind. Or sometimes stupid.

But in that moment, when we’re the ones who are hurt and angry and afraid, we don’t want balance.

We want to answer pain with pain.

We want revenge.

We want payback.

Here, dear reader, are stories of supernatural people and near people caught in those moments—when wrong has been done and must be answered.

Here are tales of scales out of balance and the actions taken to right them—good, bad, and ugly.

Perhaps it is a guilty indulgence, but what are stories of fantasy vengeance if not another attempt to consider the courses and ramifications of seeking to right the scales?

Justice, after all, is balance.

But payback…payback is satisfying.