Are thrillers all the same? Well today on Book Break I am here to prove that the answer
is definitely no. I absolutely love thrillers, they're my favourite genre, I just can't get
enough of them. And I am finding it very hard not to get distracted while standing in front
of the incredible thriller display at John Sandoe books. But as thrillers have become
more and more popular over the last few years, people are starting to wonder, how can we
have so many of them? Are they all actually the same?
So, to prove that they're not, in this video I've come up with 12 different subgenres of
thrillers that I could think of, but the range is really just infinite. So if I don't mention
your favourite thriller subgenre, please do leave us a comment below with your recommendations.
So the first genre I'm going to say is the action thriller. This is a thriller where
the excitement comes from the action, from the plot, from the tension. So a really good
example of this is A Window Breaks by C.M. Ewan. This is about a man who is woken in
the night by a noise to discover that intruders have broken into his home, and the whole book
takes place over the course of this one night, as he has to protect his family from the intruders.
And then we have the domestic thriller. So this is a genre that's become really popular
over the last few years, books like Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn really kicked that off. So
this is a book that explores the relationships between people, particularly friends and family,
and what happens when those relationships turn sinister. So I've got two books that
I've read recently that fit into that. One of them is Our Dark Secret by Jenny Quintana.
So this is about these two girls, Rachel and Elizabeth, who were friends back in the 70s.
But we also get flash forwards to Elizabeth in the 90s, when she gets a call to say that
a body has been discovered where she used to live. So we're trying to work out what
the connection is. Or we have something like You Are Not Alone by Greer Hendricks and Sarah
Pekkanen, which is about a woman who gets sucked into this new friendship group, and
finds that her life keeps getting better and better, only to discover that her new friends
are actually not to be trusted, and they have very sinister ulterior motives. And then very
closely linked to that is the psychological thriller. So these are books that focus on
the characters' unstable mental states. So a really popular famous example of this is
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins. So in this one, our narrator is really unreliable,
she's an alcoholic, and she has these massive gaps in her memory, so nobody trusts her,
she's not even sure what she witnessed, but she knows she witnessed something terrible.
And then a psychological thriller I'm really excited to read when it comes out in May is
The Hidden Girls by Rebecca Whitney. So this is about a new mother who's suffering from
postpartum psychosis, so she can't even trust her own judgement, but she thinks she heard
a scream in the night, and she thinks she saw someone in trouble at a petrol station.
Now another really big genre is the crime thriller. So these are books that are usually
from the perspective of a detective or a police officer trying to solve a crime. And Ann Cleeves
is a really big name in this genre. She wrote the books behind the Vera and Shetland TV
shows. And The Long Call is the first book in a new series she's writing. So this one
follows detective Matthew Venn, who has to return to the evangelical where he grew up,
in order to investigate a murder. And then within crime we have spy thrillers, and these
became really popular in the early 20th century. So these are books that have espionage as
a main plot point. So Black 13 is the first in a new series by Adam Hamdy, so this is
about an ex-MI6 officer in a world that is just rapidly changing beyond recognition,
terror threats are growing, the government and intelligence agencies keep being outmanouvred,
so this exiled ex-MI6 agent decides it's time to burn the espionage rule book and try to
make a difference.
And then there's the technological thriller. So this is kind of where sci fi meets thriller.
These are books that are generally set in our world, but with some element of sci fi,
some technology that's being used in a sinister way. And someone who's really good at this
is Blake Crouch. I recently read two of his books, Dark Matter and Recursion, which were
both really good examples of this. So Dark Matter is about a man who is kidnapped and
drugged and wakes up in a parallel version of his life. And Recursion is about a world
where false memory syndrome is spreading. So people are suddenly gaining memories of
whole lives, marriages, kids, jobs, that just never happened. So in both of these books,
they're really scary, and Blake Crouch is exploring the effects that the technologies
behind these phenomena could have on the world.
And then there's the medical thriller. So these are books that envision scenarios where
diseases turn into epidemics, or people use their medical training for sinister reasons.
So the master of the medical thriller is Robin Cook. He's been writing them since the 70s,
he's got loads, but a really good example is Pandemic. So in this book, it starts with
a seemingly completely healthy woman suddenly falls ill on the subway, and is dead before
she reaches Manhattan. So we follow the forensic pathologist who uncovers some rather surprising
results in her autopsy, and then as more and more of these cases keep cropping up, throughout
the city and then in other cities across the world, he has to race to discover the links
between them before this turns into a pandemic. A little bit close to the bone at the moment.
And then there's the historical thriller, and this is an absolutely massive subgenre,
because within that you could have historical crime, or a historical spy thriller, or a
historical domestic thriller, but it's a lot of fun for exploring scenarios outside our
experience, going into a different time. So for example, C.J. Sansom wrote a historical
spy thriller called Dominion, which is set in an alternative Britain that had surrendered
to Nazi Germany, and we are following here a spy for the resistance. So it's a really
scary what if.
Or a really different kind of historical thriller is The Doll Factory by Elizabeth Macneal.
So this one is set in Victorian London and kind of dives into the world of pre-Raphaelite
artists and a woman who is modelling for them and learning to paint with them. But, she
is being stalked by a collector called Silas who is increasingly becoming more and more
obsessed with her.
And then another very popular genre is the legal thriller. So Jodi Picoult was kind of
the queen of this when I was a teenager. And these are thrillers that centre around a court
case. So a really good one that I read is Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty. This is
about a woman who has an affair and ends up getting sucked into this murder trial. And
I won't tell you more than that because it's good going in without knowing much information,
other than that the case is going to hinge around this one night in an alley called Apple
Tree Yard. And then a really exciting one to mention here that's coming up in May is
The Last Trial by Scott Turow. And Scott Turow is one of the bestselling authors of court
room dramas, so it's really exciting. The Last Trial is about a Nobel prize winner who
is accused of insider trading and fraud and murder. And so he calls upon an old friend
to defend him in court. And this friend has to grapple with everything he thought he knew
about his friend, and also about the justice system. And then there's the political thriller.
These are thrillers set in the context of some political struggle. So like Hell's Corner
by David Baldacci which is set in the aftermath of what looked like a terrorist threat directed
at the president and prime minister, on the evening of a state dinner, but as a group
called the Camel Club come together to investigate it, they uncover that it might not be what
it seems.
Which leads us to the conspiracy thriller, so there's a really strong overlap here. But
in conspiracy thrillers it's often a journalist or investigative reporter, who ends up often
inadvertently unravelling some massive conspiracy. So for example Absolute Proof by Peter James
is about an investigative journalist who receives a call from someone who claims he can prove
the existence of god. That one's quite reminiscent of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, which is
kind of the ultimate conspiracy thriller, about the uncovering of a thousand year old
secret society. And then the final subgenre I'm going to mention is the supernatural thriller,
and there's kind of a blur in the lines here before it moves over into horror, which is
its own separate genre. But there's a really great subsection of thrillers that incorporate
light supernatural elements, or sometimes hints of something supernatural that quite
can't be proved. So a great example of that is Dead Girls by Abigail Tartellin. So this
is about an eleven year old girl in the 90s who sets off to solve the murder of her best
friend. And along the way, she has visions of these other murdered girls, who might be
ghosts or might be hallucinations. It's a really good feminist thriller this one.
So if you want more videos about thrillers, we have loads, just click here to browse them
all, and of course do come here to John Sandoe to browse their thriller selection and beyond,
it's a wonderful shop to look around, I will link to their website in the description box
below. See you next time on Book Break.