Why Psychological Suspense Is Popular Now
Does it resonate with you?
Why is Psychological Suspense so popular now?
Watch a short action video at the bottom of this essay that answers that question.
Flynn and Hawkins
Along with Gillian Flynn’s 2012 hit Gone Girl, the other well-known novel, titled The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins in 2015 brought Psychological Thriller/Suspense fiction to the forefront in the US. The Girl on the Train, set in suburban London, was the #1 New York Times Bestseller, USA Today Book of the Year.
The success of those books made the genres quite popular, though the genre, which arose from Gothic novels, has been popular in the UK for a long time.
And the movies adapted from both books of course fanned the flames. A genre that had languished in relative obscurity in the United States suddenly became all the rage. Book titles sprung up everywhere that began with The Girl. . .
Psychological genres provide intellectual reading that is urgent and tense and delves all the way into the depths of the psyche. The psyche is dark down there and filled with monstrous creatures that slide against you while you want nothing more than to rise from the fluid subconscious to the surface to take a deep breath.
But do we only get a deep breath of denial once we hit the surface? Of rationalizing away the horrors of our world that we participate in? Of pretending with positive thinking that everything will turn out OK for our earth and the polarization and chaos of our society will calm down and everyone will behave?
Again at night, in dreams, we are thrown back down into the waters of our subconscious, our own private Psychological Suspense reality. Wondering why nothing makes sense.
And once we awake, lying there in that liminal state, regaining our identity, we may still contemplate whether anything at all really, truly makes sense. Is everything we’re told about the nature of our government a lie? Is everything we do, personally, acting out some epigenetic obsession of our ancestors?
The Girl on the Train is often called a Psychological Thriller, though Amazon has it categorized as Psychological Suspense. The unreliable narrator (the narrator is lying to the reader) isn’t required for those genres but can be powerful, particularly for Suspense, and that POV asks a lot of readers.
But many intelligent people are up to the challenge. Readers of Psychological Suspense tend to be the most sophisticated, not satisfied with mindlessly consuming simple pop culture entertainment.
The popularity gives me hope for humanity
It’s popular now partly because more people are waking up to social engineering and propaganda.
More people than ever are questioning what authority figures tell them, whether those are newscasters or husbands. The shudder of realizing things are not what they seem can be delicious. We seek out that sensation in novels because they mimic our reality. We have to remain cautious about believing whatever we’re told, and living with that mindset can make us lonely outcasts. With the novels, we can be outcasts together. We can bond within our community of questioners.
The female characters in Psychological Suspense also are more realistic, rather than being objectified idealizations, compared to other Genre fiction and movies.
The protagonists are most often female, not usually the hot CEO or superwoman-looking FBI agent but people like the readers in their most troubled moments. While Thrillers can make readers pump out testosterone in the rousing struggle towards certain victory that saves the day for the whole society, Suspense creates dreadful anticipation of something that could go wrong at any moment, which is a precarious state many more people live in now that in recent times in our culture — without a savings, without proper insurance, surviving by a tenuous thread in a chaotic world.
Psychological genres require the most intellectual rigor of any fiction genre, so that means people are maturing to become willing and able to pay close attention.
In Girl on the Train, Rachel, an alcoholic divorcée, daily rides the train to and from London, to pretend to her roommate that she’s still employed. Rachel regularly passes the house where she lived when married, and her ex still lives there, now with his new family.
In a house not far away, an affectionate couple has caught Rachel’s interest, so when she spies the wife with another man, she gets involved, feeling she is a witness with information for the police. Her center falls apart.
However, her periodic blackouts mean her perceptions can’t be trusted. And like the protagonist in any Psychological Suspense/Thriller, she finds life uncertain and ambiguous, questioning her identity, consistency, memories and capacity for moral darkness.
Tropes of unreliability, ambiguity and gaslighting
Psychological Suspense/Thrillers tend to have multiple POVs, as does this book, which has three. The contrast between the sense of reality that we surmise from reading the different POV helps us realize how unreliable the narrator is. Or are multiple narrators unreliable?
Domestic Noir and Domestic Drama could describe the trend within Psychological Suspense narratives, which very often involve ordinary women’s secretive relationships with their families. On the surface, happily married suburban wifedom may seem like a rosy existence, but in reality, by the end of spring, roses are beginning to shrivel, brown, and look inconveniently non-romantic. Mortality and imperfection sets in even in the sweet lawns of the reputable suburbs where people are expected to keep all organic flora cut in sharply civilized edges to fit into the neighborhood.
While Psychological Suspense/Thrillers usually involve some kind of crime, the focus is not like a Police Procedural, focused on the clever and efficient professional detection. The focus is more on mental illness, substance abuse, Narcissistic trickery, and people who are set-up to take the fall for crimes.
However, the novels can sometimes be whodunits, like Gone Girl. They are more often whydunits like The Girl on the Train. And meanwhile, the protagonists are bewildered, usually experiencing gaslighting by the antagonist and maybe by other characters as well — and now, with the advent of sneakier heroines in the genre they can be doing the gaslighting themselves.
Gaslighting is naturally reminiscent of Gothic novels, including Southern Gothic, and that psychological manipulation is extremely relevant today with the role of media spin doctors and social media platforms that control the narrative with propaganda. Thrillers tend to focus more on large events such as would be covered on the evening news and Suspense is more commonly about obscure individuals, perhaps involved with manipulative Narcissists who try to make them go crazy.
Psychological Suspense analyzes the mindset of bewildered people going through hell. Often characters are pulled into the dramatic fire by their vices. They commit an illegal act to escape a painful situation. Reading such books is like a nightmare of having inexplicably killed someone and having to hide the body to protect a child.
Chick lit was apparently too light for the current culural trend of the desperate struggle for survival. With Psychological genres, there often is no clear demarcation between the victim and the perpetrator: they can even be unacknowledged parts of the same character. Amnesia and dissociation are popular tropes.
The characters experiences are disbelieved by authorities such landlords; they want to clear their name but not being sure about which details to present, being unclear about what role they might have played in a crime. Many readers have experienced situations such having no solid ground to stand on when no one trusts you and evidence is sketchy.
Cheers to the current popularity of this profound genre that creates a cathartic experience for people in our culture in which we are constantly forced to wonder what is true and what is false.
Watch this succinct movie as an additional way of learning about the popularity of Psychological Suspense today.
Tantra Bensko is the award-winning author of four Psychological Suspense novels: Glossolalia, Remember to Recycle, Encore, and Floating on Secrets. She edits manuscripts and teaches fiction writing.
