Literature
Thriller Genre
The thriller genre is characterized by its ability to evoke intense emotions such as excitement, suspense, and anticipation in the reader. It often features high stakes, fast-paced action, and unexpected plot twists. Themes commonly explored in thrillers include crime, espionage, and psychological tension. The genre's primary goal is to keep readers on the edge of their seats, eagerly turning pages to uncover the next thrilling development.
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10 Key excerpts on "Thriller Genre"
eBook - ePub- Jule Selbo(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
as well as intellectual stimulation—all in hopes of causing a deeper involvement of the individual audience member in the trajectory of the story. Narratives in the Thriller Genre work most successfully when the viewer makes a deep connection; this is often realized by engaging the viewer in an intellectual and often gut-wrenching desire to solve the dilemma alongside the protagonist.Thrillers that are constructed using the crime genre thrive on a sense of authenticity. Plots should be possible or plausible and there must be a sense of logic to the story. This will help the audience identify with the protagonist.Short History and Overview of the Thriller Genre
One of the most striking thrillers of the silent era is Suspense (1913), written and directed by Lois Weber. The story features a new mother and her baby living in a remote house on the outskirts of town. Her husband, in his office in town, phones to let her know he will be late coming home. As soon as he hangs up, a home-invader/burglar skulks up to the house and terrorizes the mother intent on protecting her child. The mother rushes to the phone; she calls her husband. The husband flees his office and, on the town’s street, steals a car so as to get home to save his family. Meanwhile the home invader has entered the house and is making his way up the stairs to the room where the mother and baby are trapped. The film moves from one narrative element to another to build the anxiety level. The mother is presented as an innocent victim terrorized by a strong and determined force. There are multiple “B” and “C” stories: the husband’s worry and desire to get home to help, the police chasing the husband to arrest him for the theft of the car, the owner of car who is livid about the theft and the home invader’s hunger and malevolent nature. Each of these storylines has their own complications that affect the “A” story of the mother and child in jeopardy. Will the husband arrive in time? Will the police delay him? Will the home invader break into the room? Will the wife jump from the window? The “thrill” of experiencing these various components and seeing how they affect one another to aid (or not) the protagonist in withstanding the threat is at the core of the thrilling engagement. The audience is not only anxious but actively participating by asking “What would I do?” The audience forms an opinion about what the protagonist should do
No longer available |Learn more- (Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- The English Press(Publisher)
Thrillers are defined not by their subject matter but by their approach to it. Many thrillers involve spies and espionage, but not all spy stories are thrillers. The spy novels of John le Carré, for example, explicitly and intentionally reject the conventions of the thriller. Conversely, many thrillers cross over to genres that traditionally have had few or no thriller elements. Alistair MacLean, Hammond Innes, and Brian Callison are best known for their thrillers, but are also accomplished writers of man-against-nature sea stories. Thrillers may be defined by the primary mood that they elicit: fearful excitement. In short, if it thrills, it is a thriller. As the introduction to a major anthology explains, “ ...Thrillers provide such a rich literary feast. There are all kinds. The legal thriller, spy thriller, action-adventure thriller, medical thriller, police thriller, romantic thriller, historical thriller, political thriller, religious thriller, high-tech thriller, military thriller. The list goes on and on, with new variations constantly being invented. In fact, this openness to expansion is one of the genre's most enduring characteristics. But what gives the variety of thrillers a common ground is the intensity of emotions they cr eate, particularly those of apprehension and exhilaration, of excitement and breathlessness, all designed to generate that all-important thrill. By definition, if a thriller doesn't thrill, it's not doing its job. ” —James Patterson, June 2006, Introduction, Thriller Writer Vladimir Nabokov, in his lectures at Cornell University, said that In an Anglo-Saxon thriller, the villain is generally punished, and the strong silent man generally wins the weak babbling girl, but there is no governmental law in Western countries to ban a story that does not comply with a fond tradition, so that we always hope that the wicked but romantic fellow will escape scot-free and the good but dull chap will be finally snubbed by the moody heroine.
eBook - PDF- Bernice M. Murphy(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
In short, it is problematic because ‘thriller’ is in fact a very broad descriptive term: the ‘concept of “thriller” falls somewhere between a genre proper and a descriptive quality that is attached to other, more clearly defined genres, such as spy thriller, detective thriller, horror thriller’ (Rubin 1999: 3). What the term ‘thriller’ does suggest is a narrative in which the main pro-tagonist is in peril from quite early on. Indeed, as Philip Simpson notes ‘“thriller” in the generic sense, tends to connote an emphasis on physical danger and action over in-depth character study’, a tendency that owes much to its origins in late nineteenth-century pulp and sensa-tion fiction (2010: 187). A thriller, then, need not begin (or even end) with a mystery that must be solved, but regardless of the specifics, the protagonist often faces considerable danger quite early on, and usually a powerful antagonist of some sort, be it a specific person (a danger-ous criminal, a corrupt politician, a rogue scientist, their own spouse) or a system (a secret organisation, a government, a dangerous group). Escalating anxiety is therefore a major characteristic. David Glover notes, ‘the thriller was and still is to a large extent marked by the way in which it persistently seeks to raise the stakes of the narrative, heighten-ing or exaggerating the experience of events by transforming them into a rising curve of danger, violence or shock’ (2003: 138). Sub-categories include the psychological thriller, or ‘psycho thriller’ (in which the state of mind of the protagonist or antagonist is of paramount narrative significance), as well as thrillers related to specific professions, sce-narios or threats – these include legal thrillers, medical thrillers, techno thrillers, spy thrillers, serial killer thrillers, political thrillers and super-natural thrillers.
eBook - PDF- B. J. Woodstein(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
and of course a detective; police procedurals, which show the workings of the police; thrillers, which show ‘threats to the social order, heroes and villains, and deduction and resolution’; and several other types, including ‘female sleuth, GLBT [sic] sleuth, historical mysteries, locked door mysteries’ and so on (Appalachian State University 2019, n.p., sic). Bradford offers a definition of thriller as a text that ‘is characterized by the exaggeration of acts and character- istics that enable the reader to exchange anything resembling credulity for fantasy and escapism’ (2015, p. 103), and he also adds horror as one possible subgenre (2015, p. 110) and legal as another (2015, p. 112). Heather Worthington includes children’ s crime fiction and feminist crime as additional categories (2010, pp. 97, 108). A big question here is whether crime fiction is a subgenre of literary fiction or if it is something else altogether. While I do not wish to engage in non- productive debates about supposedly highbrow literature versus those books considered to be lowbrow, I must pause over the fact that few crime novels are considered canonical and the canon is what tends to be taught and enshrined as classics. Bradford claims that To Kill a Mockingbird is ‘the only crime novel classified unequivocally as a literary classic’ (2015, p. 112). While I am not sure all scholars would agree with this, it is the case that many people view thrillers as ‘commercial’, where commercial is contrasted with literary (e.g. Palmer 1979, p. 69).
eBook - ePub- John Scaggs(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
From the Gothic novel, a concern with secret or hidden knowledge and the narrative and thematic spectre of social disintegration (Botting 2001: 5) are evident, while an interest in the criminal underworld is clearly drawn from such novels as Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838). From the ‘sensation fiction’ of the 1860s and 1870s, such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, comes the ‘disturbing treatment of crime, mystery and betrayal’ (Glover 2003: 136) that the twentieth-century crime thriller was to develop in its sensational, and often shockingly frank, depictions of sex and violent death. For this reason, while it has often been argued that what sets the crime thriller apart from the detective story is its focus on the crime, rather than its investigation, David Glover argues that, rather, ‘the thriller was and still is to a large extent marked by the way in which it persistently seeks to raise the stakes of the narrative, heightening or exaggerating the experience of events by transforming them into a rising curve of danger, violence or shock’ (Glover 2003: 137). The difference, then, would seem to be one of narrative effect and narrative structure, both of which go hand in hand in Priestman’s identification of one of the central aspects of the crime thriller: that it emphasises present danger rather than reflecting on, or investigating, past action (Priestman 1998: 43). Furthermore, in order to create this danger in the present the protagonist of the crime thriller must be threatened, or believe him- or herself to be threatened, by powerful external forces of some form or another (Priestman 1998: 43)
eBook - ePubCover Stories (Routledge Revivals)
Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller
- Michael Denning(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The second story, the present one, is the relatively transparent tale of how the first story came to be known. Moving across a spectrum to the thriller, there is a shift in emphasis from the first story to the second, and the crime becomes a mere pretext to a series of adventures and can eventually be replaced by a mission (a search or a quest). Todorov maintains that the two ends of this spectrum work on two different sorts of interest: the mystery, on curiosity which proceeds from effect to cause (from the corpse to revelation of murderer); the thriller, on suspense which moves from cause to effect (from villain with gun to daring escape). So what is interesting is not the absolute differences between commercially established genres – detectives, spies, private eyes, etc. – but the syntax of plot, the way the permutations of mission, hunt, and investigation are worked, the way the hunter/hunted dialectic is articulated in varieties of what we might call masculine romance. 8 This is a plot to which we will return, heeding Julian Symons’s observation that ‘almost all of the best thrillers are concerned, in one form or another, with the theme of the hunted man.’ 9 Another way of defining the genre’s formula is not by type of hero nor by conventional story pattern but by characteristic theme, the particular vision of the world the genre projects. There are two main ways the spy thriller can be so categorized. First, the world of the thriller is one of international politics and intrigue, of multinational economic organizations
The Horror Genre Take almost any deviation from customary experience, stretch it far enough, and you produce horror. Kirk J. Schneider, Horror and the Holy (1993) Horror is an emotion. It is also a genre of writing. Many authors are not happy with the name "horror." In fact, the speciality association Horror Writers of America almost changed its name in 1992. Various alternate labels for the genre include tales of terror, supernatural fiction, macabre tales, dark fantasy, fright fiction, the chiller (as a variant of the thriller), and weird tales—the name associated with the genre in the 1930s. The objection of some authors is that "horror" suggests a purely visceral reaction, whereas their writing aims at something higher than this. Ste- phen King, however, sums it up this way in Danse Macabre: [T]he genre exists on three more or less separate levels, each one a little less fine than the one before it .... My own phi- losophy ... is to recognize these distinctions because they are sometimes useful, but to avoid any preference for one over the other on the grounds that one effect is somehow better. ... I recognize terror as the finest emotion ... and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot... I will try to 2 16 John Saul horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud. (1979, 36-37) Regardless of what we call it, though, it is clear that there is a recog- nizable body of work that appeals to a segment of the public. Despite a dip in the fortunes of the horror genre in the past decade, the abiding popularity of Gothicism and the supernatural is demonstrated by the fact that half of the twelve mass-market paperbacks that sold over two million copies in 1994 were by authors associated with the horror field: Anne Rice, Stephen King, V. C. Andrews, and Dean Koontz. And this popularity shows no signs of fading soon.
eBook - ePubThe Legal Thriller from Gardner to Grisham
See you in Court!
- Lars Ole Sauerberg(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
© The Author(s) 2016 Lars Ole Sauerberg The Legal Thriller from Gardner to Grisham Crime Files 10.1057/978-1-137-40730-6_2Begin Abstract2. Law and Literature: Legal Thrillers
End AbstractLars Ole Sauerberg 1(1) Department for the Study of Culture, University of Southern Denmark, Odense M, DenmarkAs law is an inevitable part of everyday life, from minor traffic offences to corporate takeovers involving lots of money and thousands of jobs, it naturally appears in the fictional universes of drama, novels and short stories. But narrative fiction or drama with more or less law in it is not necessarily of the nature of legal thrillers. The thriller element is one of structure, not of substance. It has to do with the way a story is made to unfold, keeping the reader on tenterhooks. Narrative fiction invariably has a modicum of structural suspense, in that the urge to learn more about events and characters is part and parcel of the literary experience of storytelling. In generic fiction given to suspense, such as police procedurals and legal thrillers, the suspense structure basically informs narrative procedure and is a substantial part of its reading fascination.Legal matters appear in numerous literary works without making them into legal fiction as such, or anything like a legal thriller. Nick Carraway’s musings on the legally doubtful nature of Jay Gatsby’s income is part of Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel, but its presence hardly makes the reader feel involved with a work in which legal elements provide its driving force. Matters to do with legacies and the proper—that is, legally valid—sorting out of financial possibilities, as we see in, for instance, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
eBook - PDF- Charles J. Rzepka, Lee Horsley, Charles J. Rzepka, Lee Horsley(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
Crime Fiction and the Literary Canon 77 emotions and experience? Conversely, are literary connoisseurs seeking the so-called “art thrill” willing to put aside their aesthetic expectations and wade through detailed descriptions of sordid crime scenes that require them to muster the intellectual rigor needed in a prolonged criminal investigation (James 2007: 95)? Speaking for readers like himself who presumably belong to both categories, James writes that we long for these sleuths to be surrounded by classy prose, like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, so that we can get the art thrill and the thriller thrill at once. Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean. Great idea, great sound, great sociological significance. But above all an eventful narrative to make you read on. … For all James’s appreciation of the “art thrill,” he ultimately insists upon the primary importance of the “thriller thrill.” (Note his prioritization of plot – “an eventful nar- rative” – over Chandler’s insistence on the importance of character – “Down these mean streets a man must go …”.[Chandler 1995a: 991–2]) However much James might dream of works of literary crime fiction that bridge the barrier between mass- marketed crime fiction and literature aimed at an educated elite, he finds himself somewhat dissatisfied by a novel like Benjamin Black/John Banville’s Christine Falls that “confronts you with the question of whether you want your crime writer to have that much literary talent” (James 2007: 91–2, 96). It is fitting that James should cite Chandler as the writer who comes closest to providing his readers with a simultaneous jolt of the art thrill and the thriller thrill, since it had been this author’s ambition in the 1940s to write crime fiction that would unite lowbrow and highbrow, popular and literary tastes.
eBook - ePubGenre Screenwriting
How to Write Popular Screenplays That Sell
- Stephen V. Duncan(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
The murder: a gluttonous man weighing over three hundred pounds brutally garroted to death from behind by a killer cloaked in black clothes, the executioner’s face unseen . . .This is part of the opening sequence in my “spec” murder mystery-thriller One Dead Slob, Two Village Idiots & Three Soul Brothers .1 The screenplay is a dark comedy in the style of the murder mystery-thriller Fargo (1996), written by Joel and Ethan Cohen. While Fargo does have brutal violence, it also manages to be ironically funny. Even though a thriller may have comedic qualities (I’ll explore the comedy genre in Chapter 6 ), it still must use the basic thriller elements to achieve the goal of nail-biting entertainment.The contemporary Thriller Genre has evolved from three enduring types of storytelling: the murder mystery, the noir and the suspense drama. This chapter will take a separate look at each of them.First Things First: Key Elements to the Murder MysteryThe murder mystery has been around for a long time. In fact, an account of the first murder in the history of the world is in the Bible, in Genesis.When God approached Cain asking about his brother, Abel—who had been missing for some time—Cain asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” It turned out that Abel’s very own flesh and blood had killed him because of jealousy! The thriller film genre begins with the essence of the crime mysteryThere’s a murder . There must be a crime committed, and in the thriller, it’s always the worst thing that can happen to a human being: death.The murderer must be found . Because taking the life of a human being is the worst crime against humanity, the perpetrator must be found.The murderer must be brought to justice . To confirm the consequences for committing the worst criminal act in society, the perpetrator must be punished.But there’s more to a thriller than these three elements. It’s also important for society to discover why
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