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EDITOR'S NOTE:
David Bell is a bestselling and award-winning author whose work has been translated into multiple foreign languages. He’s currently an associate professor of English at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where he directs the MFA program. His novels include Somebody’s Daughter, Bring Her Home, Since She Went Away, Somebody I Used to Know, The Forgotten Girl, Never Come Back, The Hiding Place, and Cemetery Girl.
I believe it was the legendary thriller writer Leo Tolstoy who said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family appears in a suspense novel.”
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Somebody's Daughter
Okay, that’s not what Tolstoy really said. But if he had, he’d be correct. Families make great subject matter for thrillers. I agree so much that I frequently write thrillers about families, and here’s why:
For one thing, being in a family is a universal experience. Everybody comes from or develops some kind of family. It can be a biological family, an adopted family, a work family, a group of friends who are like family. We can’t escape the human desire to cluster together and connect. So when we write about families, everyone recognizes themselves or their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, friends, colleagues. Oh, yeah, they say, I could totally see my mom doing something like that…
And here’s another thing about families — they all have secrets. The secrets can seem quite small and make you wonder why anyone would care to hide the information. (“Don’t tell anyone we can’t housebreak the dog!”) Or the secrets can be big and clearly the kind of things people keep to themselves. (“Don’t tell anyone why your sister had to move away for nine months!”)"Let me ask you something: What’s the scariest thing imaginable?"TWEET THIS QUOTE
But we all have secrets in our families. I know of a giant one in my family. It’s so big I can’t even talk about it. But maybe it’s already shown up in one of my novels. You never know… maybe we can even talk about it someday…when everyone involved is dead.
Secrets have a way of bubbling to the surface at some point. No matter how hard we try to keep them under wraps, they eventually pop up, sort of like a corpse that’s been dumped in a body of water. And when those secrets do emerge, they bring with them a web of complications. People learn they’ve been lied to. People learn they didn’t know someone quite as well as they thought. People learn that everything they thought they knew — perhaps their very identity — has been a lie.
Let me ask you something: What’s the scariest thing imaginable? For me, I’m terrified of needles and heights. But those things don’t scare me as much as the notion that someone close to me might have lied to or deceived me. Imagine looking over at the person sharing your bed and wondering if they’ve told you the truth. Could anything unsettle a home and a family more than that?
It’s true that we thriller writers often exaggerate the problems and secrets that families deal with. Most families don’t experience murder, kidnapping, extortion, disappearance. (Some do, of course.) But so many times those wild, exaggerated crimes that occur in a thriller start with something small. Something ordinary. A secret kept. A promise broken. The smallest splash becomes a tidal wave.
And maybe that’s why people like to read thrillers about families so much. When they see the disasters that happen to fictional characters on a page, they feel relieved. They think to themselves, Sure, Grandpa can be a pain in the butt sometimes, but at least he didn’t murder anyone…
We might look up from the page, take a deep breath, and be thankful our own lives aren’t so chaotic and complicated. In that way, the thriller writer who writes about the family does everyone an important service. We remind you of how much worse it could be.
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