Why do we read thrillers?
Thrillers have captured the imaginations of readers for decades, even centuries. Whether it is a straightforward ‘Whodunnit’ murder mystery like Agatha Christie’s A Murder on the Orient Express (1934), or a psychological thriller, such as Paula Hawkins’s A Girl on the Train (2016) – a novel which was so popular that it was adapted into a box-office hit film – it is hard to deny the enduring popularity of the genre.
Why is it that we all enjoy thrillers? The answer may be very simple: thrillers are successful because they usually have a hook to grip the reader’s imagination from the very beginning, thus ensuring a page-turning read. People often fly through reading thrillers because they compel the reader forward with their exciting plots. Additionally, thrillers provide a kind of catharsis, pulling us into a world similar to our own but enticingly different and disturbing. Psychological thrillers often deal with subject matter that is, at first glance, seemingly familiar to us -- like home, family and children. In other words, those things which are supposed to make us comfortable and secure, but a psychological thriller pulls those worlds inside out, revealing dark, dangerous places. Nothing is as it seems.
In an article published by Grazia magazine about why so many of us have an urge to read thrillers, the writer hits the nail on the head when he writes that such books allow us to explore nightmares without putting ourselves in any real danger. As well as this, the psychological thrillers mentioned in this article have women protagonists, relatable to readers, who undertake actions that the reader could only dream of doing. In this way, thrillers allow readers to live vicariously through these characters in transgressive situations that bear no resemblance to most people’s lives.
Having explored some of the reasons that so many of us turn to a thriller as our book of choice, the next blog post will explore a subject closely related to thrillers: True Crime. If you are unable to wait for the next blog post to find out more, Neil Root’s Covering Darkness: Writing True Crime is available here in the meantime.