Why Riley James enjoys writing thriller fiction
Read a piece from The Wreck author Riley James.
I enjoy writing thrillers. I write them to provide comfort and assurance for readers. I want to convey a happy sense that life could always be worse, people could always be worse, and places could always be, uh, not so good.
Let’s suppose your beloved pet has died. In thriller land, not only has your pet died, but they have come back from the dead and tried to kill you in your sleep. Because you buried them in a secret Mi’kmaq burial ground, when someone expressly warned you not to.
Or maybe, in real life, you discover your husband has another woman. In thriller land, not only does your husband have another woman, but she is locked in the attic and escapes every now and then to set your bed on fire. Because her gaoler forgot to lock the door—again.
Hey, life’s not so bad, is it? Life might be mundane and repetitive—a barren shell of email and spreadsheets and office politics, with only a few simple pleasures—but it could be worse. When I read thrillers myself, I experience a mixture of dread and terror, but also a sense of relief: this isn’t happening to me. It’s happening to someone else, and they’re coping badly—they’re making terrible decisions, with terrible consequences—and all I have to do is complete that excel sheet by 5pm, to avoid a curt email from Sebastian.
One thing that also brings me joy and inspiration: societal collapse. I love thrillers in which the characters arrive in a hostile land where the normal rules of society don’t apply, either because it’s too cold and remote, or everyone’s so shocked and confused. I love the idea of a Hobbesian “state of nature”: that condition of human beings before they contract into society and set up frustrating laws like “keep to the left” and “don’t kill each other”. That Hobbesian world is pure chaos—a never-ending war of all against all. Sebastian’s spreadsheets don’t amount to a hill of beans in that crazy world. That crazy world would eat Sebastian for breakfast.
More importantly, in this imaginary world, we get to see people as they really are, stripped of social masking. Some people are nasty, brutish, and short tempered, while others maintain their humanity and repress their urge to swerve right and kill others. This creates a natural tension between characters, and thrillers are all about tension, but in a controlled, sandbox kind of way, in which Sebastian gets his comeuppance on p. 290. That’s what we thriller writers call catharsis, an ancient Greek word meaning “good riddance to bad rubbish”.
My latest book, The Wreck, taps into these themes. It’s a survivalist thriller about a group of people who arrive on a wild and remote island, trying to solve an aviation mystery from twenty years earlier. There’s dread and terror, and tension and suspense, and not everyone makes it through breakfast. But dear reader, I can comfort and assure you: there will be no spreadsheets.
The Wreck
by Riley James
A gripping survivalist thriller from the author of The Chilling about researchers marooned on a remote island in the Bass Strait while searching for the wreckage of a plane that disappeared under mysterious circumstances twenty years earlier.
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