Laurie Chambers is the mother of Jake Chambers. She has a tendency to sleep with sick friends and also had an affair with her masseuse. She is fond of art. Her pet name for Jake is "sugarlove" and used to sing lullabies to Jake, but they had the unfortunate effect of scaring him. One in particular, "I heard a fly buzz when I died" (originally a poem by American author Emily Dickinson ) made Jake afraid of a creature he called the "Deathfly".