Bad Husband Brigade
Oh brother these guys STINK
I haven’t read that many Thrillers because I get turned off by titles that have too many synonyms for “sharp” or “small” or more than six words but even as a neophyte it’s clear to me a staple of the genre is The Terrible Husband. It’s a beautiful author pasttime where you make up a man to get mad at. I consider it a kind of artisanal craft, like sock puppetry, but you’re beefing with the sock.
There are obviously more and less subtle versions of this but if you are cracking open a thriller (a female-driven one, anyway. Men may have written thrillers too, where the men are cool and interesting and the women spend their time either breasting boobily while making interested facial expressions toward them or shrewing shrilly in the distance, but we just don’t have the technology yet to track this) and there is a husband in it, you can bet your biscuits that man is going to be:
cheating
hiding something
doing financial fraud
hiding doing financial fraud with the person he’s cheating with.
I’ve started falling in love with the more subtle way authors signal to readers that this is going to be a Bad Husband.
In No One Can Know, the Husband starts off on a pretty bad foot by strong-arming our protagonist, Emma, into moving back into a house she hasn’t seen since it was the scene of her parents’ very publicized and still unsolved murder when she was a teenager. The thing is, he says, he didn’t tell her this when they were putting down a nonrefundable cash offer on a house they did not get, but he actually lost his job several weeks ago, and well, if she wants to keep the baby (she just found out she’s pregnant, by the way) living in the murder house is pretty much the only option if she can just be reasonable about this??
Okay so maybe it’s not his fault she didn’t tell him that a lot of people, including the unprofessional police chief, still think Emma Did It. It’s kind of a requisite in this kind of book that the Tragic Past Wife intentionally seeks out a kind of clodheaded, uncurious husband whose glassy stare will overlook their panic attacks and Episodes While Remembering Said Tragic Past. And when a character casually drops that her Husband has access to and regularly checks her location? Yeah you’ve got a Bad Husband right there.
I’m in awe of the way Hollander writes her Bad Husband in Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead. This protagonist just found out that the tabloid massacre she survived in college is being made into a movie that might cast new doubts on her shaky account of events, and this man makes her go to a wedding dress fitting with his New York socialite ice dragon of a mother and when she is sleeping off the panic attack at said fitting he has the GAUL. The fucking COJONES. To make this literal face 🥺 and ask why she hasn’t been asking about how his work’s been going. JaIL!!!!!
I’m holding your face in my hands when I say this in a gentle voice. I’m going to spoil Beautiful Ugly for you now. And I’m really sorry about that but I promise if you ever read Beautiful Ugly there will be enough going on that your experience will not be impacted on a fundamental level by knowing the twist. Someday I’m going to write a tribute issue of my favorite books that go absolutely off the rails and this will get pole position in that. (I love a book that goes off the rails. It’s like watching someone jump a gulch on a motorcycle or something. Like the effort is not ruined for me by being ungrounded, if that makes sense. Haters might call this “not having any taste” but what are you gonna do.)
All that being said. Even before anything is spoiled, the opening of Beautiful Ugly is some of the most Oh Brother This Guy Stinks of all time, like Hall of Fame Stinkery, as he complains to me, the reader, that his stupid wife isn’t home yet from her incredibly demanding crime reporting job as he waits to find out if his novel made the NY Times Best Seller List. Ok maybe that doesn’t sound so bad to you and fair enough but what if I told you he was going to, in like five seconds, kill said wife and then spend a year wandering around complaining to his agent that he can’t write anymore since his wife went mysteriously missing and slowly going broke until she sends him to a remote island to get his act together? And then while on that island he starts seeing glimpses of his wife again, like maybe he couldn’t even murder her correctly? Are you Getting A Load of This Guy yet? I’m glad someone keeps hiding bones in the floor of his rental, I’ll tell you that much.