June: Seeking thrills and chills with thrillers

This month’s genre theme is thrillers, and it has been exciting exploring the many facets of this widely encompassing genre. Some of the great thriller writers include James Patterson, Dean Koontz, Jonathan Kellerman, Stephen White, Patricia Cornwell, J.A. Jance, Stephen King and John Grisham. Thriller authors seem to have a knack for keeping readers on the edge of their seats, chewing their nails down to the quick, and fighting off sleep to finish reading the last few pages. Many great thriller novels become thriller movies, such as The Firm, Night Train to Munich, Odd Thomas, The Girl on the Train, The Andromeda Strain, The Foreigner, The Pelican Brief, The Silence of the Lambs, and Die Hard to name just a few. Thrillers make the adrenalin flow and the heart pump with anticipation. In a broad sense, a thriller is an adventure or mystery novel, (or movie), that feeds on suspense to get readers’ adrenelin pumping and keep them turning pages, because they have to learn what… happens… next.

Within this context, there are many subgenres of thriller, including spy novels, political thrillers, psychological thrillers.  My review books this month, The Gamma Sequence, by Dan Alatorre and Only Wrong Once, by Jenifer Ruff are both medical thrillers, but they are two very different stories. My interviews this month are with International bestselling novelist Dan Alatorre and my “Chatting with the Pros” author guest is psychological thriller author John Nicholl. The subgenres are many, and sometimes the lines are blurred between thrillers and horror novels, or thrillers and mysteries, or thrillers and crime fiction, but as master thriller author James Patterson said in his book Thrillers: Stories to Keep You Up All Night (2016),

“But what gives the variety of thrillers a common ground is the intensity of emotions they create, particularly those of apprehension and exhilaration, of excitement and breathlessness, all designed to generate that all-important thrill. By definition, if a thriller doesn’t thrill, it’s not doing its job.”

Yes, it’s the excitement we feel when we read a good thriller, the sudden rush of adrenaline when catastrophy strikes and it seems there is no way out for the hero(es), or the anticipation that makes us jump in our seat when the villian attacks even though we saw it coming, these are the feelings that keep thriller readers coming back for more. Good thrillers are usually fast paced to keep the action moving and keep the adrenaline pumping from the first page to the last, throwing in twists and turns, and maybe a series of ups and downs, that keep readers on the edges of their seats and never quite give them a chance to rest until that last page is turned.

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