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Thriller Novels: Where Does The Thrill? Come From

By James Marinero

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 25Jan2012 Word count: 810 Viewed: 114 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Hardly any novel lover has not read any thriller novels at all. This genre is immensely popular with readers of all ages. The best thrillers have supplied tantalising suspense, excitement, and enjoyment to readers since the first beginnings of the genre. Their scope is vast, with many sub-genres.

So, what are they?

Fundamentally, the novel must be able to generate thrills in its readers. Straightforward enough, but what were the origins of the thriller? The predecessors of thriller novels originated with the writers of early civilizations such as the Greeks or Persians. For example, the Odyssey in Greek and the Mahabharata in Sanskrit were, it can be argued created using similar narrative structures to the modern day thriller novels. First consolidated in the 10th Century (as far as historians can tell), the Arabian Nights lays plots the first ever detective thriller as a story entitled as "The Three Apples".

With this ancestry, the art has grown and contemporary thrillers can be sub-divided into several genres such as the espionage related thriller, medical, political, legal case related thriller, historical, technological, action, adventure oriented thriller, religious institution related thriller, and romantic thriller. At least. And that's without mentioning horror and the supernatural. Thrilling the readers, that's all it's about, and there are so many ways. Generally, all of the above sub-genres will be generating thrills by working on several aspects of the reader's mind: emotions, empathy with a character, impatience, uncertainty, fear, anticipation and even panic. The most able author will be playing with more than one of these subconscious of the reader's mind simultaneously.

The reader's imagination, though, is definitely the most effective target area for the novelist to work on, but it is also the one requiring the highest skill to manipulate effectively. Though each of the sub genres has its own features, there are a few standard techniques employed by novelists. For example: the concealment of relevant facts from the reader until the a climax, the vivid description of fighting. Add in foreshadowing to build anticipation, sudden twists in flow of the story and hanging chapter ends and you have the basic devices used by the skilful artist to build the scene for the thrill..

Let's briefly look at a couple of sub-genres in more detail:

The espionage thriller offers a typical example of the thriller novel genre-type. Some of these focus on the mechanisms of espionage structures within particular countries and governments - for example the British SIS or the Chinese Guoanbu. Other novelists focus on detailed spy-craft - dead letter boxes, meeting protocols and the like. The main character is often an anti-hero having a 'beef' his superior.

Mystery thriller novels, concentrate mainly on the investigation details and suspicion hinting technique, setting 'red-herrings' in the reader's mind . The detective sub-genre has a subgenre-of its own known as 'police procedural' which hinges in detail on the way that police forces investigate crime.

So, there's plenty of scope for writing and giving thrills to readers.

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