You don’t
trust your beautiful, young wife anymore. The way she crawls out of bed in the
morning without so much as a sideways glance while immediately going for her
smartphone to check her text messages, as if expecting a slew of new electronic
love notes from someone she met on Facebook. Or is it Plenty of Fish? Or Ashley
Madison?
She
sits across from you at the breakfast table, occasionally working up a
half-hearted smile when you compliment her on how nice her lush blonde hair
looks this morning. But she’s not listening. Not really. She’s waiting for the
moment you leave for work, so she can call the new boyfriend, arrange for him
to come over, make passionate love to her in your own bed.
That
night, when you arrive home, she’s not there. You feel your heart pounding in
your chest because your built-in shit detector has convinced you your wife is
cheating on you and now, all you need is the solid proof. You scour the house,
going through her dresser drawers, through the closets, through her desk
drawers. You find things that don’t necessarily prove she’s conducting an affair,
but don’t disprove it either. New underwear. Sexy, expensive stuff that she’s
never worn for you. New perfume. A box of condoms. Then you find it, inside a
manila file folder hidden inside a suitcase in the vestibule closet. Photos.
She and some unidentified man making love in your bed.
You’re
devastated. But even worse, you’re mad. Blood boiling enraged. How could you
allow this to happen underneath your own nose?
She’s
coming home soon. That much is for certain. And you’ll be waiting for her.
You
pull your shotgun out from under the bed, and load both barrels. And as you
wait for her in the living room, with the lights off, you listen to the voice
inside your head that tells you revenge is yours.
“Till
death do us part…”
This is the essence of domestic thrillers.
Psychological suspense that occurs in the most sensitive of
battlegrounds…Behind the closed doors of our own home-sweet-home. Domestic
thrillers entertain and yes, disturb the very core of our humanity since there
is no escaping the fact that we all have families, no matter how dysfunctional,
and we all have homes, no matter how broken. How often do we hear about the
nice young couple down the road who seemed to be so in love and still, out of
the blue you’re rudely woken up one night to the sound of police cruisers,
their bright flashers lighting up the neighborhood. Turns out the young husband
has shot the young wife in the head with blast from a double-barreled shotgun.
Love is a many splendid thing, but it can also be violent, unpredictable, and
downright bloody.
Domestic thrillers have been keeping us in
suspense for generations. Remember James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity? In the movie version, Fred MacMurray locks hungry
eyes on a leggy Barbara Stanwyck as she descends the stairs in a house she
shares with her beastly husband. It doesn’t take an Einstein to know that said
husband’s days are now numbered.
Or how about James M. Cain’s other
masterful domestic thriller, The Postman
Always Rings Twice? That old Greek gas station owner doesn’t have a chance
in hell once that drifter pulls into his lot, looking for a job, all the while
eyeing the Greek’s delicious young, and hopelessly unsatisfied wife.
Later on, the domestic thriller would take
a turn for the creepy and supernatural with Rosemary’s
Baby and The Exorcist. Both
psychological dramas that would take place within the home-sweet-home, and
involve family members who would display such evil that not even hell would
take them in.
As the 1980s rolled around, a new
generation of domestic thrillers would grace both the bookshelves and the
silver screen. Stephen King gave us a terribly disturbed and murderous novelist
in The Shining, while Fatal Attraction kept movie goers on the
edge of their seats for an entire summer. Owning a pet rabbit would never be
the same.
Nowadays, thrillers like Gone Girl and even my own Everything Burns feature stories told by
unreliable narrators who are at once likeable, but who are also manipulating us
in ways which keep us turning page after page, long after the bed lamp should
have been turned off. In these 21st century, digital age
psychological thrillers, good and evil are not so black and white, and they
perform a delicate balancing act in both our conscious and subconscious,
disturbing us all the while keeping us entertained.
If all domestic psychological thrillers
have one thing in common it is an erosion of trust. The twisting and turning
and general mutilation of the one basic necessity required of all
relationships, especially that of blood relatives. It’s one thing to be afraid
of ISIS and their terrorist methods. But how do you deal with the terror of a
family member who is out to kill you? How do you cope with the woman or man who
is lying in bed beside you, precisely plotting out your own demise?
Or are you just plain paranoid?
That’s the other side of the domestic
thriller. Maybe the evil that resides inside your own home doesn’t exist at
all. Perhaps it’s just a figment of your imagination. Perhaps the evil resides
entirely within. One thing that’s for certain, domestic thrillers are always
described with adjectives like, “gripping,” “riveting,” “page turner,”
“disturbing,” and of course, “horrifying.” They also provide us with something
that other varieties of thriller cannot. They make us question our own personal
belief in right versus wring. In a word, we can relate on a personal level to
domestic thrillers. And that’s what scares us the most. After reading a
profoundly tense domestic thriller, you are not only entertained, you can’t
help but look at yourself, your loved ones, and your domestic situation in a
whole new light. You also avoid mirrors for a few days.
People often ask me why I write domestic
thrillers. The answer: I’m not sure why I do it. Truth is, I’ve never been very
comfortable in a domestic situation. I feel far more at ease when boarding a
plane for a far off land. Families can be wonderful things, but they can also
be filled with terror. Maybe that doesn’t make sense to some, but then, what
doesn’t make sense to me is staying in a relationship that is destructive,
mentally and/or physically. Or putting on a smiley face for the neighbors when
you know for certain your spouse is not only cheating on you, but has been
looking into a hit man who will put a bullet in your brain when you least
expect it.
It’s possible that by writing domestic
psychological thrillers, I am providing myself with the kind of psychoanalysis
that can only come from an expensive shrink. Perhaps by writing Everything Burns and The Remains, I am purging my soul of
some of my greatest fears. Fear of the double-cross, fear of torture, fear of
murder that comes not from some unknown enemy, but from someone I assumed I
knew as well as myself. Someone I loved with all my heart. Someone I wished to
spend my life with. Someone with whom I pledged, “I do”…Someone who wants
nothing more than to see me six feet under.
Vincent
Zandri is the NYTimes and USA Today bestselling author of EVERYTHING BURNS and
THE REMAINS, both from Thomas & Mercer. His official website is WWW.VINCENTZANDRI.COM
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1 Comments
What a fascinating article! So much information here that the next time I pick up a psychological thriller I'll be reading it from a new perspective.
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