PNW Book Blogger

What makes a good thriller in my opinion 

Please keep in mind I am the pickiest thriller reader you will ever meet, but if I would give you a recommendation, you can trust it with your life. 

It is usually expected that there’s gonna be some spooky things in a thriller, just because of the nature of the genre and the public perception, but to be thrilled and to write a thriller, it just needs to be a faster paced story. This is why when I see slow burn thriller I actually spit out my coffee.

I struggle so much to find psychological thrillers that are fast paced, and I find a lot of FBI thrillers mystery thrillers that are slower paced, and they are definitely more mystery books even like with a horror theme almost.

I feel like a lot of thrillers are genuinely mis-categorized as just mystery or horror books that are categorized thrillers because a lot of times when I pick up a thriller I’m like “this is a horror book”. 

My favorite thriller authors are Freida McFadden, and others. See my Goodreads.

I do definitely appreciate a spooky dark red like a John Marrs book the one for example I really love that one and I do love a good techno thriller, like Dan Brown.

For the most part, though, when I pick up a thriller, I am wanting it to be as lighthearted as possible.

The more outrageous and ridiculous the better.

something that’s just outrageous and something that will keep me entertained if it happens to have a scary element to it that’s wonderful but my main objective when I’m picking up a thriller is not to be scared shitless 

I also don’t want to feel very sad when I’m reading a thriller that is not the anticipated emotion and that’s not what I usually expect 

This is why there are only a few publishers that I really get Books from that I trust.

I also spend a lot of time trying to make sure that the thrillers I pick are from female authors because I tend to feel like they tread carefully when it comes to really dark concepts, whereas authors like James Patterson just go all out and it could be a lot.

I also really appreciate the more modern thriller authors that go against the societal standards of what a woman supposed to look at and be and how was she supposed to interact in a domestic environment and breaking that mold.
There’s a lot of authors that will essentially put QVC messaging (iykyk) into a book and it translates very poorly in my opinion and use outdated ideas, and there are a lot of books that DNF due to that. you can just feel the self hatred of themselves and of the female gender in general like I don’t know why so many authors just stick to self hatred and put their characters through hell?

I heavily prefer a what the fuck type of something that’s clever or something that makes you think something that keeps you up at night because you’re wondering what will happen next.

I think it takes a lot more creativity to do something like that and to get your brain to think and it doesn’t necessarily need to be a scary element.

It’s borderline a lot easier to continue pulling dark topics and put them in a book and make them scary because by nature, losing a family member is bad and scary and sad. If you’re writing a book about that by nature, it’s probably going to be a sad book. If you pace it a little bit faster it’s gonna be a thriller to me. That’s not a book I will ever be interested in personally because I find that to be an unoriginal concept.
I don’t want to read a book about someone’s sister going missing or someone’s going missing or people who go back-and-forth and every two years I don’t want to read a book but there’s a random letter exchange in between I want to be completely engrossed in the story and I wanted to know what’s happening next. A lot of authors will add variations into their text, whether it be time or formatting and I think it’s meant to keep your attention but for me it takes me out of it completely and reminds me that I’m reading a book and I’m not in a story.

Storytelling is the act of showing through words and creating something that your brain can wrap around and get into and so when authors don’t do that, I’m gonna DNF the book.

I am just getting into Gothic darker literature and I do enjoy it a lot from authors like ST Gibson, but they write more fantasy so, not thrillers per se.

I really prefer thrillers that take place present day that are silly over the top but have a little bit of some actual conflict to grasp on and I don’t like it when the protagonist is either just filled self hatred or hate themselves and that’s half the joke.

When there is humor in a thriller, it’s a huge bonus, but it’s not something that is essential for me. I just want to be enticed. I want you to get me interested.

If you don’t even have a hook in your thriller, I’m assuming that you didn’t really read your book out loud and you just kind of wrote it and assumed that the story would want to be heard. You have to use a hook just to pitch someone via email to get them to read it so why would you not put effort into that first impression on your story?

Why would you not put a hook in your thriller, that doesn’t make any sense not to?

I also genuinely despise prologues that are really long chapters that are really long and paragraphs that are really long.

For me when you’re doing pacing a lot of that has to do with the format of the book and so fantasy I expected to be longer chapters longer paragraphs and slightly less dialogue, but with thrillers, I expect shorter paragraphs shorter chapters and slightly more dialogue.

When there’s a genre mash up a fantasy and thriller, I go in with less of these expectations in mind and just let the author do their thing however, if I do go into that, I try to make sure that the book is as close to familiar elements I have enjoyed in the past. A lot of times if it’s a book from an author I’ve never heard of before or a publisher I’ve never heard of before, it’s a huge 50-50 and I never know if I’m gonna enjoy it or not.

The thing with me though is, I do a lot of soft DNA for mood reads, so I will literally pick the book back up once it’s published. Read it and buy it.

But I’ll have the advanced reader copy and either maybe I’m just not feeling it or I didn’t like the writing style on that moment and then I’ll read a different book that changes my perspective of the writing style and I want to give it another chance

This being said I do have hard DNF but usually it’s due to concrete reasoning. A lot of the time I DNF Books and I absolutely plan to come back to them and read them and I do about 95% of the time.

Being a mood readers genuinely such a struggle and I think it’s even a bigger struggle because authors might think that you just really don’t like their book in reality It’s a matter of needing to feed your brain like the taste that it wants in the genre that at once and sometimes it’s just not the right timing.

I think a lot of times the timing is everything with books.

When you pick them up and where you’re at in life and your experiences in your personal life just like connections to the book impact your experience heavily.

I try to make it so that when I put up pick a book up, I’m gonna have as much of a positivity bias for it as I can. I’m gonna have as much connection to it as I can because why would I wanna pick a book up that I’m not gonna be interested in?

So when I am looking for thrillers, there are common themes in troops I look for.

Basically if it says for fans of Freida McFadden or an “unputdownable psychological thriller” (the marketing Freida uses that others are using now too lol), I’m probably gonna pick it up because there’s not a lot of those books that exist that are written by female authors that lived in the United States specifically.

When I was younger, trying to read “flat” in a thriller mystery book, I did not understand any of the British or Australian lingo, and it genuinely hindered my reading experience because I already struggled to read when I was younger, and so it made me actually hate books and so now I have to be pretty careful about writing style in the language used.

There can be some amount of variation if I’m used to it, but I don’t force myself to read books where the language and the slang of that region is very specific and it’s just not very international friendly book. Now I know this is not super cool, but this is just for thrillers specifically.

Thrillers are my comfort genre and so because of that I tend to get stuck in my mentality of what I want to read, but I also think that’s a good thing because it helps me understand exactly the type of book I want and I don’t really go outside of that type of book very often so if I’m with my thrillers, I usually have more luck as I’ve gotten that are able to find out what my taste is and it takes a while to do that unfortunately. Even growing up with thrillers, it took me a while to figure out which ones I enjoyed in which ones I don’t.

FBI and police procedural thrillers I usually just don’t enjoy however if there’s an author that I enjoy that has written it, I’ll probably pick it up because I’m not necessarily against that and I’ve i’ve read books that do have the FBI Police thing element and then that I’ve enjoyed but I really don’t like FBI crime thriller series in particular. I just find them to be incredibly boring and dark at the same time and also gross because we’re going into descriptions of the body they have very very boring dialogue. That’s very dry without much humor and then they’ll go into very very boring. Slow dialogue about the office. I don’t wanna read that

So this is my opinion on how it’s kind of formed over the years if you want to see these psychological female authors that I am keeping an ion to check out this blog post

This was written via voice memo so please excuse typos and passive voice and run on sentences. There is no priority to ensure proper editing or proofreading on these blogs. I’m just vibing.