the rise of the domestic thriller

 Oh, I'm 100% years late on this trend, and while I did read Gone Girl at least... in a relatively timely manner, this past year has really been the year of the domestic thriller for me. Domestic, psychological, whatever--I think Gone Girl was really instrumental in naming it a domestic thriller because it kind of kickstarted the trend of thrillers from the perspective of a random woman rather than a detective, and so of course it has to be 'domestic.' 

But anyway, these past few years I've been nabbing thrillers from used bookstores, from Book of the Month, from Goodwill. I've read a number of the more popular ones--Big Little Lies, The Woman in Cabin 10, Behind Closed Doors--and I've got some big ones still to read--The Woman in the Window, The Girl on the Train--but overall... man, I dunno what it is, but there is something about these books that are entirely interesting and fast-paced and so goddam easy to read. 

I feel like it's the new 'chick-lit.' Don't get me wrong, I've read and enjoyed my fair share of Sophie Kinsella. But these thrillers are like, they're the easy fast chick-lit with some consequences. Even if sometimes the villains are actively unbelievable (Jack from Behind Closed Doors comes to mind), the situations are often so fucking wild that I don't care how unbelievable it is. It's fun as hell. Even the chunkers like Big Little Lies are fast, because it's so damn hard to put them down.

I've had to actively hold myself back from instinctively picking the requisite thriller from the Book of the Month selection every month, because there's always one, and I always know it would be interesting enough to hold my attention and for me to really speed through. It's like--okay, so horror is my favorite genre, and this has become my horror lite rather than the 90s teen horror that I used to eat up. I mean, I still dig that 90s teen horror, RL Stine stays a giant piece of my heart, but these fun little thrillers are like... man, they're like horror if horror was always human and often with much less gore. Which is a little sad, because I love gore. 

But either way, I'm genuinely excited for the amount of thrillers I still have in the Book Wall, and if you'll excuse me, I've got to go back to The Wife Upstairs.