What we talk about when we talk about the psychological thriller
spoiler: often, it's stuff that turns out not to be true
Hello, welcome and warm thanks for signing up, I really, really appreciate it. A very quick disclaimer: I’d love to spend hours each week mulling over these pieces, but the usual suspects – life, work (copy-editing for me) and writing fiction don’t leave that much time, which means each one will be more or less a first draft. This is vaguely terrifying, even if I am drawing on notes from a class I’ve taught a couple of times in the Irish Writers Centre. Maybe if you imagine we’re in a pub or café and I’m bending your ear, and afterwards, whether you agree or disagree with what I’ve said, if you haven’t already left, you can weigh in! I do plan to be regular at least, so one of these should appear in your inbox every Friday afternoon, in the main coming in at around a three-to-five minute read.
So, what do we talk about when we talk about the psychological thriller?
We talk about an unreliable narrator. But what’s a reliable one? I don’t think such a thing exists, in fiction or in real life. We all have our blind spots, our wants and desires that lead us to see some things and not others, even if the other is there right in front of us. If a person really doesn’t want to see something, it could be there in front of them, with flashing Elvis lights, doing the Dance of the Seven Veils, and they might not see it, if some part of their mind decides it’s better for them not to. Surely this is a universal human trait; ever ordered takeaway because ‘there’s nothing in the fridge’? (There’s always something in the fridge.) Maybe it’s partly how we’ve managed to survive as a species for all this time. The point is, if a novel is character led (a matter of varying degrees in this genre, maybe, but that’s a topic for another day), then the protagonist is going to be unreliable. As Robert Olen Butler says in his brilliant book on writing fiction, From Where You Dream, we’re constantly being inundated by cues and messages from our senses, but we only tune into a handful of them. What makes the selection? Our emotions do.
The protagonist is ‘fragile’ or ‘vulnerable’. I hate this one. Because, again, aren’t we all? ‘We all’ meaning us humans, here on our ‘utterly insignificant little planet’ as Douglas Adams I think put it. Surely, we’re nothing if we’re not fragile or vulnerable. It’s just it’s so much a part of what life is, we can go huge chunks of time without thinking about it or even feeling it (most likely a good thing).
It is true that the protagonist of this genre often has had a traumatic childhood or has recently undergone a traumatic experience as an adult. Addiction is not uncommon in these stories. The other side to this, however, is the fact that the protagonist of a psychological thriller tends to make it out alive, from whatever highly perilous situation that they’ve found themselves in. And not by sticking their fingers in their ears and going ‘la, la, la’. In some way or other, they walk into its darkness and get themselves out by actually going through it. Which, in my view, makes them strong! Survivors! Pretty damn scary even in their own way! In the brilliant series The Landscapers, there’s a great line when DC Emma is told the suspect’s husband said his wife is fragile. ‘Fragile people,’ she says dubiously. ‘They’re always the ones holding the reins.’* It’s a bit of a generalisation, maybe, but I think there’s something in that.
We talk about a ‘dissolving sense of reality’ for the protagonist, or the disintegration of their character, whereby the psychological pressure they experience as the plot thickens becomes so acute that they experience, if briefly, a kind of madness. Usually around the climax. This one comes up a lot in articles on the genre, and it has some truth in it, I suppose. The trouble is there are plenty of exceptions, particularly among the classics. Tom Ripley never takes leave of his senses. Neither does the narrator of Rebecca. Deputy Ford in The Killer Inside Me, if I recall correctly, pretty much keeps his cool to the end, God bless him.
We talk about crime or, more precisely, violence. The protagonist must directly experience violence, either as a victim or as a perpetrator (or sometimes both). And this is the one that sticks, at least for me. Once, a student asked me if it was possible to write a psychological thriller without any violence in it. It’s a really good question; before she’d posed it, I’d never even thought to wonder. And the good thing about teaching is that you never get to just decide something is true, you must be able to explain why. My strong intuitive response may have been, yes. Absolutely. The story must involve one person inflicting violence on another.
But why?
The answer begins with another generalisation about this genre that I think is always true:
The protagonist of a psychological thriller must be an ‘ordinary person’. What I mean by that is she does not work in the criminal justice system, as a lawyer or a cop or a detective. She is someone whose job does not tend to bring her into contact with crimes of violence. She’s a teacher or a nurse or an unemployed person or a parent or a retiree or – you name it. In a cop novel, the fact that the protagonist encounters violence as part of their job can act as a kind of buffer between the reader and the danger. But if the protagonist is ‘ordinary’ or ‘regular’, just like the reader, then this brings the danger closer, not just because the violent crime concerns them directly, but also because they’re encountering it in their personal rather than professional life, usually because it’s either directed towards or perpetrated by them.
This gets us close to what I think is at the heart of the psychological thriller. It has something to do with how it brings the reader close to danger, a danger that is not safely out there but that feels unsettlingly close by …
Next week, I’ll try to say a bit more on this, via the work of Edgar Allan Poe.
Have a good weekend,
Liza
* This is more ore less what DC Emma says in The Landscapers; I couldn’t find the exact quote.
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