Compassion vs. Derision in Thrillers
When I’m having trouble focusing on my book, I’ll often pick up a thriller to give my mind a break. It’s basically like watching an episode of Law & Order: for an hour I’m engrossed in a fast-paced story unselfconsciously. I tend to read them with my editor’s brain off—I don’t feel the need to pick the style apart, maybe because it’s not my genre. 2020 has been stressful enough that I’ve read more thrillers than average, though, and themes do become apparent: I’m much more likely to enjoy the book if the narrative feels compassionate to the protagonist.
“Compassionate” feels like an odd word to use in the context of thrillers. They are action stories; usually they are about murderers. Generally everyone is very stressed out. Protagonists tend to get injured or find themselves and/or their loved ones in grave danger. Women tend to befall especially terrible fates because of the misogyny of their villains.
But thrillers also tend to feature a character-oriented B-plot, which gives plenty of opportunity to delve into the complexity of human emotion. We often meet the protagonist’s families and friends. Sometimes those loved ones are threatened or in some way involved in the investigation; sometimes they form a world away from the investigation. The ‘loved ones’ contrast can provide an essential balance in thrillers: they create stakes for the protagonist, ensure that the protagonist has something to fight for, and can illuminate a softer side to the protagonist lost in the necessities of efficient investigation. Thrillers that foster the most reader investment cultivate an angle of compassion for the protagonist as much as derision for the antagonist.
This can be a difficult balance to strike. Two thrillers I’ve read recently approached the task from opposite sides and encountered roadblocks with the balance by cultivating either too much or too little compassion. Heartbreak Bay by Rachel Caine (out March 9, 2021—thank you to NetGalley for the ARC!) dives deeply—maybe too deeply—into the personal lives of its protagonists, while Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train relies too heavily on derision and loses narrative satisfaction in the process.
Heartbreak Bay is the fifth book in the Stillhouse Lake series, but despite not having read its prequels, I found Gwen’s history eminently followable. Gwen was married to a serial killer, who hunted her and her children for at least one book, and whom she killed in an earlier installation. Now she and her partner Sam—who used to lead a group dedicated to uncovering whether Gwen acted as her husband’s accomplice, creating convincing tension in their relationship—strive to live as normal a life as possible while raising Gwen’s teenage kids.
Because there’s so much history already uncovered in the series, we arrive at Book 5 with an unusual ability to unpack the consequences of previous thrillers’ events. With standalone books, a thriller will often end with the culprit meeting some comeuppance and we get a brief epilogue that doesn’t give us details on how the protagonist deals with the aftermath of the book’s events. With this series, Gwen’s PTSD—the PTSD in her whole family—is thoroughly explored.
Through trying to live as normal a life as possible, much of the family’s lives is abnormal: they sit in the family car to wait for the garage door to close so they can activate their home’s considerable alarm system before exiting the vehicle. They go on family outings to the shooting range explicitly for self-defense purposes. The kids are forced to deal with people knowing their dad was a famous serial killer at school and have to learn how to respond to that. Gwen receives regular threatening notes from her ex-husband in the mail, despite that he is dead.
The most satisfying aspect of the book was this character exploration. Gwen’s plot is only one of the novel’s threads—Gwen works as a private detective and is hired by her friend, a policewoman named Kezia, to solve the strange murder of twin baby girls. The plots are well balanced and entwine well, and I connected to Kezia on the investigative side. But a limitation of a series like this is that people are here for Gwen’s story, which gives Kezia a bit of a short shrift—even while elements of Gwen’s story felt done to death.
So committed was the book to cultivating this compassion for Gwen and her circumstances that almost her entire arc was spent working through a PTSD checklist, sometimes without significant payoff. After being driven out of a practice range by flyers alerting the public to her former identity, Gwen steps out and endures a panic attack. Sam and the kids somehow don’t recognize this, and call an ambulance out of concern. Once back on her feet, Gwen resents the cost of the moot ambulance call but internally notes—in a tone that felt incredibly artificial to an internal monologue, but very intentional for the PTSD narrative—that she’d rather have the bill than have risked her safety.
This beat in particular felt there to cultivate drama and compassion for Gwen with no ultimate payoff. There was no point to the panic attack when it came to plot, and it was resolved quickly and without significant consequences with only a “better safe than sorry!” note before the event faded into irrelevance. Gwen endures significantly more pressuring situations in the book, but her tendency to panic attacks is never brought up again.
This moment did, however, ratchet up the tension. It ended a scene that was comparatively low-drama—an employee at the shooting range asks them to leave; a plot component is revealed; the family just leaves—on a very dramatic note. Thrillers are defined by their sense of propulsion, which needs to be almost incessant to hold reader attention. A page-turner is made or unmade based on how much the reader wants to learn what happens—how much they want to find catharsis for the building tension.
Growing and entwining different threads in an ever-expanding web of tension is… difficult. I’m not a thriller writer. But my suspicion is that in this case, the writer backed herself into a tension corner. Discomfort plays an active role in our consumption of thrillers: reading on is the only way to alleviate the discomfort of tension, which means tension does occasionally need to break, and it’s hard to break a tension that didn’t significantly build. It’s this—when and for what purpose tension is built—that defines whether or not the balance of compassion and derision lands in a thriller.
Gwen’s panic attack was unsuccessful for this reason. It was put there to stimulate sympathy with Gwen’s incessantly stressful life, but the tension was never given catharsis. Indeed, this sense of relief was not often present in the book. By the end, Gwen is given another extremely traumatic event to live through. Her life is made harder instead of easier, and the very brief glimpse we get of her in the epilogue suggests weariness and resignation—no catharsis. No guarantee of a better life.
Gwen’s arc feels stilted owing to this lack of catharsis. The chief strength of a series over standalones—ability to dive deeply into character arcs, ties, and motivations—may in this case also be this book’s foremost weakness. Gwen’s been set up to have another horrible adventure in trauma in a hypothetical Book 6. There is no satisfaction of knowing she’s earned a retirement from major events of trauma. Because of the genre she’s in, she’s bound to be managing increasingly complex PTSD until the world she’s in salts and burns.
The book wanted so much to instil compassion for Gwen, and they succeeded—with the result that the reader feels unsatisfied about her open arc. Too much compassion is an improvement over its alternative, however. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins is a standalone thriller about Rachel, a divorced alcoholic who takes the train into work each morning to pretend to her roommate she hasn’t been fired. Unluckily, the train passes right by the house her ex-husband bought her out of and moved Anna, his pregnant girlfriend, into. This proximity makes it hard for Rachel to move on. To cope, she starts narrating the life of a seemingly perfect couple who lives a few houses down who spend a lot of time on their back balcony in view of the train. Over time, Rachel forcibly inserts herself into the drama on the street when Megan, the woman in her ‘perfect’ couple, disappears.
This book suffers from a lack of compassion almost across the board, except for a brief glimmer when Rachel and Anna have a proper conversation in the latter half of the book. Most notably, Rachel is treated by the narrative with the utmost derision. This book hinges on the premise of Rachel as unreliable narrator: she’s a blackout drunk, so though she seemed to be in proximity of Megan’s house on the night she disappeared, she remembers none of it.
The three women of the story—Rachel, Anna, and Megan—are the story’s focus. Like many good thrillers, the flaws of these characters are foregrounded; Gillian Flynn’s novels—Gone Girl, Dark Places, and Sharp Objects—all feature deeply flawed women who venture to take control of their circumstances. But unlike Flynn’s protagonists—and unlike Gwen from Heartbreak Bay—none of the women of The Girl on the Train are remotely bolstered or empowered to take hold of their lives.
Arguably, this powerlessness is the explicit theme of the book: these women either are or wish to be ensconced in the expectations of suburban white womanhood, which is the site of their subjugation. But, especially because the book relies on Rachel’s self-destruction and inability to take control of her life, there is little catharsis in her narrative. No compassion is shown or offered to her by anyone in the story except her long-suffering roommate.
While Heartbreak Bay relies on love and compassion to combat the horrific world Gwen and her family find themselves in, The Girl on the Train’s narrative relies on the characters’ and readers’ derision of Rachel. Context is eventually given to her alcoholism in what may be intended as a glimpse of compassion, but instead the narrative and supporting characters continue to show her contempt. The overwhelming impression is that, in failing to take account of her life, Rachel’s suffering is deserved.
Just as overreliance on compassion in the narrative created a lack of payoff for Gwen, absence of compassion created the same problem for Rachel: Rachel ends the book unsupported and, though the epilogue hints at a better life, she is as alone as she was at the beginning of the book. The tension that was built—whether Rachel will ever pull herself together enough to get to the bottom of a mystery she’s involved in but can’t remember—was resolved in the sense that the mystery was solved. But again, there was no catharsis to the tension. We are led to consider Rachel with derision by the narrative itself and by the characters’ responses to her, but only in the epilogue are we permitted to view her with compassion. The message is that Rachel is only worthy of our compassion once she’s out of the book’s events.
Gillian Flynn has become the gold standard for thrillers in my mind because of her knack for blending reader compassion with derision in how they interact with the narrative and culminate tension in catharsis. All three of her books feature deeply flawed protagonists whose character traits don’t necessarily compel our compassion, but whose circumstances do. As in The Girl on the Train, the protagonists are self-destructive women—but they are doing everything they can to take control of circumstances that define them. You wind up rooting for the characters, even if you don’t like them very much.
I don’t think that a thriller needs derision to be successful, nor necessarily very much compassion; the catharsis is more important than either of these things. There are plenty of thriller subgenres—I devoured Stephen King and John Grisham as a teenager, for example—that rely on character interiority much less. But modern contemporary thrillers often rely on derision just trying to titillate in the way true crime does for commercial reasons, and if your story relies on derision, compassion is required for balance. To successfully tell human stories involving serial killers, compassion for the people affected by their actions is a required element.
This is a balance true crime often fumbles. Without compassion, thrillers risk depicting a one-dimensional world: one without heart, where the most effective way out is through heartlessness, cruelty, or unfeeling. There is no fight against the horrors endemic in thriller worlds without compassion, which normalizes those horrors the way derision was a normalized response to Rachel. Without narrative compassion, there is no provision of a way out of horrible thriller world or through—no alternative, no better life on the other side.
I’ll be thinking about Gwen from Heartbreak Bay for a long time. In my mind, she and her family have picked up and moved far away, given to a quiet life where no one knows who they are and they’re able to cultivate the trust and joy they deserve.