When we sat down to write our first romantic suspense novel, Strike and Burn, we knew from the very beginning that for the first time we’d be playing in the dark. Between us, we’ve published many books, but all in very different genres, and much of what we’d written separately was aimed at kids and teenagers. With this book, we wanted to explore a whole new morally complex world–one where meet-cutes happen in a morgue, where shadows lurk around every corner, and perhaps most importantly, where our two main characters and love interests were both anti-heroes.
The truth is we live in a world where we do seem to have some universally agreed upon ethical rules. For example, we think most of us (hopefully) wholeheartedly accept the commandment: Thou Shall Not Kill. And yet, within the confines and comforts of fiction, even that one seemingly bright line can seem, shall we say, bendable. And that’s the beauty of reading (and for us writing)–we get to explore and cross boundaries we’d never feel comfortable trampling in real life, and better yet, root for people who are braver, more ruthless and perhaps more willing to get their hands dirty in ways we never would. Without giving too much away, in Strike and Burn our hero and heroine (or anti-hero/heroine) meet and fall in love and find they share a surprising thing in common–they both are willing to do whatever it takes to protect the people they love, even if it sets their own world on fire.
In the following five novels, readers can’t help but find themselves occasionally rooting for the dark side.
The Plot & The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz
Jean Hanff Korelitz seemingly does the impossible with her “The Book Series” which encompasses both The Plot and The Sequel –she skewers commercial fiction with literary flair while simultaneously writing two exceptionally accessible and page-turning commercial books. Jacob Finch Bonner–a down on his luck novelist and a teacher at a third rate MFA program–steals a blockbuster plot idea from a recently deceased student, and the reader goes on the ride of what happens when this stolen book becomes a huge international bestseller. At no point do we actually like Bonner, whose middle name is obnoxiously appropriated from To Kill a Mockingbird, but we can’t help but root for this pretentious anti-hero as his act of literary theft gets more and more complicated. It’s impossible to describe The Sequel without giving away the masterful twist of The Plot, but let’s just say in this rare case the sequel may be even better than the first book, and follows a brilliant, sociopathic woman–a quintessential anti-hero–who needs to do a little light murdering to keep her true identity a secret.
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
There are no good people in Gone Girl, only fascinating and surprising characters. If you are one of the few left on the planet who have not yet read this masterpiece or saw its film adaptation, we will not spoil the ending. But man, if we were to teach a class about badass anti-heroes, this book would be required reading.
You by Caroline Kepnes
It’s amazing what we’ll forgive when our main character is a gorgeous, hyper literate, and in the tv adaptation, perfectly played and encapsulated by Penn Bagdley. This unsettling novel is at times both terrifying and disturbingly sexy–which as the writers of a book with an…ahem, morgue sex scene–is exactly our jam. The reader accidentally finds themselves at the thrilling center of an obsessive love affair orchestrated by a psychopath. Did we mention that the psychopath is hot? He is. Very. And yup, of course, also dangerous. While we refuse to fall in love with Joe Goldberg–a girl’s got to have some lines–did we occasionally root for this anti-hero? Yes, yes we did.
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
Like The Book Series, Yellowface is an anti-hero story about a novelist appropriating and stealing another writer’s work (in this case a white woman stealing a book written by an Asian American woman about the Chinese Labor Corp) and passing it off as their own. At times a fun satiric inside-baseball skewering of the publishing industry, it’s also an exploration of white privilege, discrimination, cultural appropriation and professional envy. Kuang uses first person present tense to take us right into the mind of our unreliable narrator, and like all the books above, half the fun is the squeamishness and disgust we feel at the shamelessness of our anti-hero–as one of many examples, she takes on a pen name that misleads readers into thinking she’s Chinese. This literary thriller–like most of the best anti-hero novels–makes the reader compulsively turn the pages while simultaneously making us reach for the Costco size bottle of Tums.
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