I am a thriller writer and reader. I also write reviews that appear on various sites around cyberspace. In the last week, I’ve had several requests from non-thriller readers asking me to recommend something for them. I did a quick check of some reader forums and found similar requests: non-thriller readers looking for thrillers.
What drove these readers to seek out thrillers in particular? Obviously, last week’s tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary moved them to seek comfort in reading, but why thrillers and not spiritual books or fantasy novels or some other genre?
Escapism was my first thought but that didn’t hold up. Pure escapism would point readers toward fantasy or Sci-Fi, something set in a whole different world. Something so alien it would help us forget a tragedy we know is unforgettable. But the people who came to me weren’t looking to escape.
I backtracked to better understand their new interest.
Was your experience on the 14th like mine? I overheard someone talking about a school shooting in the checkout line at a store. I wasn’t sure what they were talking about, so I checked my phone and found the Internet buzzing with the story as it unfolded.
Everything in my life stopped. I was in shock. The reports were contradictory and incomplete. Hour by hour, the facts changed and changed again. There were no answers.
There will never be any answers.
But there are stories.
There are stories of individual heroism by the principal and the teachers. Stories of courageous children helping each other; a bus driver who led six to safety; a neighbor who took in fleeing kids; and many others. Then there were side stories, like the priest who realized, as he stepped into the fire station, that he had no idea how to handle that magnitude of grief.
The one story that will never emerge is the one that explains: Why?
All we are left with is the personal question: Would I have been brave?
Hopefully, we will never answer that question in real life.
And that’s where thrillers come in. Readers don’t seek them out to escape from reality but to imagine heroism in action. How would Reacher, Fox, Pendergast, Pitt, Cross or any of the other heroes and heroines handle the situation? Which leads us to imagine—as we have since we first read Treasure Island—how we would have handled the situation.
Thrillers are real-world scenarios where one person must save many. They give us a controlled environment to examine and imagine our own courage. They don’t have happy endings. But they do end with all the threads resolved and justice served. They open our imaginations to the unthinkable, allow us to imagine ourselves facing those same threats and solving the problem while saving the innocent.
Over the last few days, social media sites have been posting a quote that sums it up:
Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. – G. K. Chesterton (Poet & Essayist 1874-1936)
Peace, Seeley
