I love thriller movies and thriller TV shows, and books are no different. I get so into thriller books that sometimes I finish them in one day because I want to know who the killer is or the twist at the end. I think the thrill of reading them is not knowing who the bad guy is, and you feel like you are in the protagonist’s shoes and part of you is yelling at the book, telling them not to do something.
Thrillers really test our fear; it makes us reflect on who we trust, even in our own lives. A lot of thrillers, it will be the husband or even the sibling that was the bad guy, and that scares people because it feels real. I’ve read one where it was in multiple perspectives. A mailman, delivering mail to a house where he heard gunshots, a nosy neighbor across the street, and a family inside trapped with someone they thought they could trust.
The twist was that the man who had the family hostage was the woman’s older son, who was angry that she moved on and had more kids with someone else and had forgotten about him. It was sad because it felt like it was just a misunderstanding. What he had done was not justifiable, but it is human to feel abandoned.
Then there are books where it’s the husband who just got mad at the kids for crying or something, and the wife just says they are babies; they can’t help it. You don’t think of a husband being the bad guy, but it happens in all media and even in real life. That’s what scares us so much with thrillers: the knowing that it could really happen, and if you are in a bad situation, especially an abusive one, you don’t know if you can trust them.
I think authors feed on that fear of knowing it could happen, and that’s what makes the author and book successful. One day I hope to be among them.
