Reading thrillers as a woman is a funny thing. It’s usually women who are the victims of acts of horrific brutality, and if their bodies aren’t being outlined in chalk, their minds are being called into question. Women in thrillers are there to be killed and raped and terrorized, or to be mistrusted and doubted and dismissed. And the strangest thing is that we can’t seem to get enough of them. I know I can’t.
Why do we do it to ourselves? Why do we expose ourselves time and again to things that we know will shake us to our core?
Of course, as every woman knows, there’s no avoiding danger. We exist in a state of constant low-level fear for our safety. Checking under the bed before climbing under the sheets at night (that Luther episode again), walking down a dark street with keys clutched between our fingers, headphones off, shadows scanned, eyes avoided, ponytails tucked in. It’s the unspoken code we learn as young women and live by for the rest of our lives. Thrillers know the code, too, and both validate it and exploit it. There are things out there waiting in the shadows, they tell us. If you’re not careful, they’ll come for you, too.
Thrillers act as a talisman: if we read it, it won’t come.The Romans used to invoke the spirits of the dead to protect themselves from the living. Each year during the Lemuria Festival, the head of the household would walk around barefoot and toss black beans on the floor as an offering to any malevolent ghosts who might want to do the family harm. I’m not saying that we should go back to throwing legumes around but, in a way, this is what we’re doing when we pick up a particularly brutal thriller. By seeing our darkest fears written down on the page, and by then conjuring them up in our imaginations, we’re calling them into existence in order to inoculate ourselves against them. Thrillers act as a talisman: if we read it, it won’t come.
Maybe we use them as cautionary tales, too. In the same way that folklore was used in part to warn people about lurking dangers (hello, Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel: kids, don’t mess with strangers when you’re all alone in the woods), thrillers warn readers about the dangers lurking in everyday life. If we read closely enough or, in the case of the current thirst for true crime podcasts, listen hard enough, there’s a chance we can figure out what missteps led to the victim’s downfall and avoid making them ourselves.
But there’s something else that thrillers can offer us: redemption. In fact, male-led thrillers seem to do it by default—we all know that that Jack Reacher will triumph in the end, even if he has to go through hell to get there. Why is it that male thrillers reward the hero while female thrillers tend to punish or demean theirs?
It’s not that women are sadists. I suspect that it’s more, sadly, to do with the narratives we’re dealt. Men kill. Women are killed. Women suffer. Men endure.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Women crave redemption, too: the thrill that comes from watching a fellow woman survive against all odds. These moments aren’t uncommon in film: who wasn’t cheering when Neve Campbell and Monica from Friends killed that masked psychopath in Scream? Or when Ripley emerged victorious after finally defeating the Xenomorph in Alien? And what about Linda Hamilton pumping out pull ups in her prison cell in Terminator 2 like a total badass?
Women crave redemption, too: the thrill that comes from watching a fellow woman survive against all odds.But the needle is starting to shift. Laura Lippman’s enigmatic heroine in Sunburn was never anything but in total control of her own destiny. Gillian Flynn’s female characters, while not always the kind of people you’d like to meet for a drink, are certainly capable of navigating—and, in some instances, instigating—tricky situations. Good or bad, these fictional women are complicated, magnetic, and whip-smart, and unapologetically make their mark on the world. Most people who read Gone Girl won’t be able to recall the name of the male character once they’ve finished the book, but everyone remembers Amazing Amy.
In my debut thriller, Freefall, two women are placed in extraordinary circumstances. A young woman survives a plane crash and must go on the run to survive and, halfway across the country, her mother has to fight to prove that her daughter is alive and in need of help. The lives of both women are at stake; the only way they can save each other is to save themselves in the process. Terrible things happen to these two women, but theirs aren’t stories of victimhood. They’re stories of heroism.
This is reflected in the stories we tell each other, and the stories we seek out: to see someone tested to their limits, and to watch them survive. The narrative is not—or at least not only, and not always—that bad things happen to women. It’s that women have the ability to survive when bad things happen. We can fight dirty and draw blood and light the match that burns the whole thing down. In fact, it’s precisely because we coexist with fear that we know how to beat it. Self-preservation—and the desire to save the ones we love—is our most primal instinct. This is the kind of thrill I want to feel most of all.
