Thrillers: Why are the Only Good Women Characters a Bit Murdery?

I read A LOT. Much of this is down to the blessing (or curse) of being able to read pretty fast. It's awesome when you have to read a book for your homework (or the adult equivalent, book club) and have only a couple of hours to get through it, but it also means that getting hold of enough books to keep you entertained can be expensive. I still remember the bitterness of spending my pocket money on a new Sweet Valley Twins book when I was about twelve, and as I closed the last page forty minutes later, I thought "Well, that didn't last long." Now, for reasons of money and storage, I'm all about the library – not just for paperbacks but also ebooks and audiobooks.

            C.S. Lewis, my spirit animal

I've only recently discovered audiobooks, which are life-changing. They make mindless tasks like long journeys, washing up, and sanding and painting walls (don't ask) an opportunity to catch up with a good story. But being a fan of trashy thrillers, I've noticed an annoying trend: the only women worth reading about have psychopathic tendencies.

The funniest of these was my vote for Den of Geek's book of the year (which you can read here): C.J. Skuse's Sweetpea: it made me snort with laughter AND have nightmares. (It was genuinely a bit disturbing,) It was so refreshing to read about a woman who took action, had opinions (strong ones) and thought outside the box. I've slowly realised that all the female characters I've enjoyed this year have been rather ferocious, in stark contrast to the standard "heroine in peril" female protagonists of today's thrillers.

Publishing works in cycles. First we had the glut of vampires in the wake of Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries. Then The Hunger Games' Katniss spawned a ton of teenage girls who could shoulder the burden of leading a dystopian revolution. The latest craze is a genre that I like to call "Ooh, am I mad?". 

These novels follow a standardised formula: our heroine (who may or may not be alcoholic) will normally have experienced something harrowing. Perhaps a break-up (The Girl on the Train), a break-in (The Woman in Cabin Number 10), a rape (Someone is Watching, Tell Me No Lies), being a war correspondent (My Sister's Bones), or having a heart transplant (The Gift). The traumatic event will result in lots of nightmares / childhood flashbacks  / general confusion; the upshot is that she spends a lot of time absent-mindedly stepping in front of cars and needing to be held back by the burly arms of a potential love interest, losing time to the lure of pills or alcohol, not being sure what is real and what is imagined, and generally acting like a neurotic Victorian heroine, transposed into a 21st century situation but still tending to faint, simper and hallucinate herself into the clutches of an enemy.

It's exhausting work

Since "gaslight" became a verb, we've been aware of the power of a story about a woman who thinks she might be losing it. But I'd like to point out to writers that it's more fun when we know she isn't and watch her try to put together the pieces. If we too are thrown every two minutes by scenes in which she falls over a lot (or wonders if perhaps she did murder that person after all and she just can't remember), it rapidly becomes trite and boring. Also, while it may be a comment on society that woman are so often ignored or dismissed as crazy and hysterical, i'm not sure how helpful it is to constantly portray women as, well, crazy and hysterical.

Prepare yourself for an attack of the vapours as I bitch about some of the books I've read recently which have made me want to puke (in the manner of a female character who has just glimpsed an alarming newspaper headline / menacing stranger / obscene text message).

And..... SWOON.

Nuala Ellwood's My Sister's Bones featured an experienced journalist who doesn't know how to convince anyone that she really is seeing a little boy in the supposedly uninhabited next-door garden. Gosh, if only war correspondents knew how to work cameras! Another character has to ask somebody if she was responsible for someone's death – she doesn't have amnesia or anything, she just doesn't trust her own memories. No particular reason why, she's just a girl, innit?

In Louise Jensen's The Gift: the gripping psychological thriller everyone is talking about (yes, this really was the official subtitle... you've got to admire their chutzpah) Jenna receives a new heart in a transplant and is intrigued about her donor's background and what exactly led to her death. (That just sounded so much more intriguing than this book actually is). Jenna dumps her boyfriend because she hates his sympathy (totally happens in real life all the time) and then proceeds to have random hallucinations, such as the taxi she's in crashing. It's not a portent of any kind, just the author trying to jazz up the scariness factor with stuff unrelated to the story. Likewise the flashbacks to her donor's life story are dull, because nobody reading a thriller is interested in hearing a child's view of the beach. 

Although cellular memory is a pretty well-known theory, nobody in the novel is familar with the idea that Jenna's new heart could carry her donor's memories. Anyway, she spends the entire book keeling over for various reasons, but decides not to tell the police of the danger she's in because there's a chance they might not believe her. (A plea to all writers: come on. You need to come up with more convincing reasons for your characters to make bafflingly dopey decisions.)

I got tired of Jenna's repetitive quivering and the "thumpthumpthump" of her heart, while other readers found alternative sources of annoyance. My favourite Amazon review queries: "I didn't understand the constant referencing to Ed Sheeran. Was the author involved in some kind of dare?"

Hands up if you could happily go for the rest of your life without
 ever hearing an Ed Sheeran song again. Oh, you too Ed?  

As a writer, reading flawed books as well as great ones is an illuminating exercise. It's taken me this long to realise a fundamental truth: bad writers start with a big climactic ending in mind, and they don't care how implausible the story has to be to get there. Just like many horror movies, these thrillers suffer from the "sympathy versus stupidity" ratio which dictates that the heroine does enough inexplicably dumb things you will sooner or later come to the conclusion that they deserve everything they get.

Behind Closed Doors (B.A. Paris) is supposed to make you think that perhaps the seemingly happy couples you know could be hiding a secret life of abuse. However, it actually makes the point that you COULDN'T live a life like the one depicted without it looking really bloody odd. Grace's horrible husband keeps her prisoner in her own home, but they keep up the appearance of being totes normal.... obviously, it's never explained what happens when they're at one of their fancy dinner parties and she leaves to go to the toilet... does he go with her and wait outside the door? Because that would be a bit of a giveaway that he couldn't risk her leaving so much as a lipstick S.O.S. on the bathroom mirror. 

Grace doesn't take any of the ample opportunities for escape, because that would be too logical. Instead she waits until ....... SPOILER ALERT..... she has no choice but to kill her dastardly husband. Big payoff, but the journey to get there was so ridiculous it ruined the book for me.

Likewise, Lisa Hall's Tell Me No Lies has a protagonist with a troubled past, just trying to make a fresh start with her husband and child. Steph finds all the neighbours extraordinarily friendly – with the tagline "Don't. Trust. Anybody." I wouldn't expect anything less. But seriously, if you made a new friend who lived across the road and was forever "popping in" and asking you for your computer password, and soon afterwards your only other friend dropped you  because of the abusive emails you never sent, wouldn't you think something was up? Steph ignores every sign that new BFF Lila is the person behind the threatening messages and break-ins at her house, even when it's signaled to the reader with neon red flags. 

Why is she so thick? Because anyone with any intelligence would avoid acting like a crazy erratic person, and that would ruin the climax ....... SPOILER ALERT..... of Steph being carted off to a padded cell. That's right, rather than installing a CCTV camera at the first sign of suspicious activity around her house, she carries on telling people all her most paranoid ramblings, with no proof, until everyone is convinced she is psychotic. The really stupid thing is that her other friendly neighbour knows the truth about Lila so presumably that big climactic ending of Steph being taken away by the men in white coats would actually have been resolved about five minutes after the events of the last page.

Women: Being hysterical since... always! 

Perhaps it's an encouraging sign that today's heroines mostly have to be a bit  drunk and dishevelled in order to not be believed; in older stories just being female was in itself a reason for nobody to take you seriously. (Although having the slightest mental health issue in the past, even post-natal depression, apparently marks you as a nutter forever, no matter which century you were born in.) 

Several of the "Ooh, am I mad?" novels do enjoy some retro inspiration: The Woman in Cabin 10, set on a tiny, ultra-luxurious cruise ship, has a distinct The Lady Vanishes vibe. The improbably named heroine, Lo, is all of a fluster in the claustrophobic setting and it only gets worse when she thinks she might have overheard a murder. I love Ruth Ware's writing and this was a suspenseful, exciting story, but I couldn't help feeling exasperated with Lo's inability to convince people she wasn't just a nutty alcoholic. I know, I know, that's what makes the story work. But seriously, pull yourself together, woman!!

There's a Rear Window-style plot in Someone is Watching (Joy Fielding) as rape survivor Bailey is reluctant to ever leave her apartment again. (Apparently rape also means you forget how to drive a car and will be crashing into walls in no time.) Although .... SPOILER ALERT.... even when Bailey figures out that those suspicious activities in a neighbouring apartment have all been a show to make her look  crazy when she reports them to the police, she STILL DOES. Why are these women always so stupid? 

Is it because acting like a competent human being
would bring the story to an end way too fast?

                                                              

One more: The Lie, by C.L.Taylor. I actually loved this book: it was deliciously creepy and suspenseful, exploring the  murkiness of female friendships in your twenties.  When a  girls' holiday ends in disaster at a sinister spiritual retreat, Emma wishes to leave the past behind, even changing her name. But somebody knows exactly who she is and what happened five years ago, and they're coming after her. 

It's a great read, but I couldn't help agreeing with this Amazon reviewer: "What is so irritating is that it is filled with a group of friends who find even the most innocuous happenings distressing enough to either rush from rooms before they faint, or to vomit. Anything out of the ordinary sends them into frantic fainting fits or evacuations of their lunch. I gave up when the main character got a facebook message that predictably made her sick, only a few pages earlier someone had whispered in her ear causing her to rush from the room yet again to vomit in an empty margarine tub. Other times they are falling over spraining ankles, legs, knees, etc. It is like reading a famous five novel who are all accident prone, ready to swoon at the slightest thing, and suffering from gastric flu." 

She probably saw a particularly cute puppy on instagram 

                               

So what can we read as an antidote to all these feeble women who vomit at the merest provocation and need someone to hold them up while they're crossing the road? There is a tradition of hard-boiled dames in literature ranging from Becky Sharp to, er, Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca. (What are you saying, anyone called Becky must be a bitch? I see you, Beyoncé!) Any broad in a Raymond Chandler novel, not to mention modern-day leading ladies such as Lisbeth Salander and Sookie Stackhouse have all had their ruthless moments. Here are some more of my recently read favourites featuring women who range from a bit feisty to actively disturbed / evil. I find it interesting that so many of these anti-heroines are written by men, while it's women who are portraying their fellow females as pearl-clutching waifs who couldn't bash a man over the head with a shovel if their life depended on it.

Peter Swanson's debut novel The Girl with a Clock for a Heart effortlessly falls into that old-school Philip Marlowe mould, but to me it felt a tad unfinished. He really hit his stride with The Kind worth Killing, a tale of a murderous web of deceit –  it begins with Ted, who gets talking to a woman called Lily in an airport lounge, confiding in her about his cheating wife and his wild, improbable wish that he could just kill her. It all gets a bit Strangers on a Train but much, much twistier, with a calculating anti-heroine you can't help rooting for.

What's more, the back story we learn bit by bit is just as interesting as the present-day action – so many writers seem to think it's essential to throw in lots of flashbacks to the characters' past, but its mostly just boring filler. Here, absolutely nothing is wasted. 

The Boy in the Woods (Carter Wilson) has a shockingly violent intro which is introduced as clever framing device, as novelist Tommy Devereaux uses a haunting experience from his youth as the plot of his latest blockbuster. Imagine his surprise when the psychopathic woman in question sends him a note: "You didn't even change my name." From that moment on, his safe existence is threatened by her irresistibly page-turning cat-and-mouse game.

I was drawn to A Head Full of Ghosts (Paul Tremblay) because it had a blurb from Stephen King saying it had scared him. For most of the book you would be forgiven for thinking that Stephen King was a bit of a wuss, although there are some creepy moments as the story unfolds; it's a slow burn with twists for DAYS.

Stephen King: Quite wimpy, really.

Set in the not-too-distant past, teenage Marjorie appears to be demonically possessed, and we see much of the action through the eyes of her younger sister, Merry. This is juxtaposed with a present-day blogger recapping the reality show the family took part in, documenting Marjorie's descent into either schizophrenia... or something more supernatural. It throws in a healthy dose of feminism, pointing out that the religious figures involved in the exorcism believe in Marjorie's "possession" mostly because they don't think a teenage girl would be smart enough to do the research necessary to fake it convincingly. 

As a side note, I must point out that audiobook narrators are the most underrated of actors; what a cool job to get to play EVERY part. Here Joy Osmanski portrays 8-year-olds, demons, smartmouth bloggers etc with ease.

You know how sometimes when you're reading a book you think "Oh it would be cool if X or Y happened"? In this book, there is nothing you could add or take away to improve it. It's complex and clever, leaving you wondering how much of Marjorie's issues were due to an illness and how much a spiritual ailment. The ending is just about the most chilling and memorable as anything I have read.

Sharp and dark in equal measures, The Luckiest Girl Alive (Jessica Knoll) rather daringly features a heroine who is not a very nice person. Other characters don't trust her, and as the story unfolds, we're not sure that we can either. She's kind of a grown-up mean girl, but as we learn more about her not-terribly-happy school days there are hints that something terrible happened. When all is finally revealed, will we find she was an innocent victim, or was she responsible for the catastrophes that still reverberate in her life today?

                                   

At first glance, Sometimes I Lie (Alice Feeny) might seem like your standard "helpless woman, doesn't understand what's going on, might be a bit cuckoo" thriller, but the punchy blurb gives us hope:
  
My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me: 
1. I’m in a coma.
2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore.
3. Sometimes I lie.

It's that last line that raises the story above the standard trashy thriller; immobilised in a hospital bed, Amber can hear the conversations around her as she recalls the events of the last few days before the accident that put her there. Why did her husband keep going to visit her sister? Why does the guy she knew at uni keep popping up to ask her out? And has someone got it in for her at work? As we unravel the myriad mysteries of Amber's story, can we believe she is who she says she is? 

I hope more writers get the message that women can do more than just black out every time they're faced with danger, because it's so much more fun to read when they do. But I lthink we can all appreciate this quote from https://lithub.com/10-female-killers-in-fiction/: "American culture as a whole is still much more obsessed with the idea of the beautiful dead girl than it is with the beautiful deadly girl."

Yup.

Catcallgate

So the latest video to go viral features a woman walking around New York getting catcalled; apparently some people have found this surprising. (Perhaps they didn't read my recent take on feminism.)

Her outfit of dark jeans and a plain t-shirt was obviously meant to be inconspicuous; most women learn in their teens that wearing a t-shirt with any kind of writing on it will only encourage leering men who "want to read what it says". No doubt if she'd dressed in the style of a footballer's wife with false eyelashes, waist-length hair extensions and a glossy pout, it would have been even harder to get through to those who wish to dismiss the ogling in the video as an anomaly.

Unsurprisingly, the popularity of the video has resulted in the featured actress Shoshana Roberts being threatened with rape; it's become the catch-all response to anything internet trolls don't like. (By the way, can we not call the crackdown on internet abuse "Chloe's Law"? Rather than naming it after someone whose mum aired controversial views on Loose Women, we could use the opportunity to honour Caroline Criado-Perez, who was persecuted by trolls after campaigning for bank notes to feature a woman.)

US "entertainer" and Conservative Rush Limbaugh weighed in with his opinion that the men were just being polite (another way of saying women should "take it as a compliment" when men shout at them in the street). Although few of us would agree with a man who claims "no means yes if you know how to spot it", you might be wondering why women wouldn't respond to such harmless greetings as "Good morning" and "How you doin' today?" Wouldn't that be so much nicer, if everyone greeted their fellow humans as if we were living in a 1950s movie? 

Well, women don't respond to overly friendly men for exactly the same reason you always rush past the chuggers with clipboards who try to get your attention on the high street. Because we know that engaging in any way – even just a "thank you" or a reciprocal "Good morning" will mean getting sucked into a conversation that we didn't want to start. 

The only people who have the luxury of watching this video and seeing nothing but "compliments" are the people who don't understand the context. That context is that the guys saying "Hey, beautiful!" could turn nasty in a nanosecond if you don't respond the way they want you to. Websites like Bye Felipe have the full array of sugary sweet nothings which changed into shocking aggression when girls took longer than 15 minutes to text back, or dared to say "no thanks".

I think this is my favourite. Question asked, question answered.

As we've learned from sites such as okcupid's nice guys, we have a generation of young men who are full of "You're so gorgeous" and "I'm a real nice guy" unless you disagree with them in any way, at which point all hell breaks loose. Lesson learned: when a strange man starts chatting you up on the street, it's just safer not to engage.

The video has been criticised for editing out the white men; it's not that they didn't contribute to the mass of "compliments", it's just that "for whatever reason, a lot of what they said was in passing, or off camera." I'm guessing this means they fell into that particular category of men who wait until you've walked past and then mutter something under their breath about what they'd like to do to you. (My MO has always been to ignore street harassers so hard that they begin to doubt their own existence, but one day I might just confront one of these "shy" boys to see if they'd repeat themselves while making eye contact.)

In YouTube's comments we see sentiments such as: "She's wearing really really tight jeans, with a tight t-shirt. She is very curvy and her clothing draws attention to her voluptuous assets. If women don't want unwanted attention, then wear looser, baggier clothing. I guarantee if you do this, men will stop ''harassing you'." (Why do I get the distinct feeling that this person would also profess hatred for Muslims and disapprove of anyone wearing a hijab in public?) 

I actually think this guy's take on it is hilarious: He's trying hard to empathise with women but can't shake the belief that he would love to get plagued by ladies saying "God DAMN!" at the sight of him.

 

"When men say 'God bless you' when you walk by, you know you got a big ass".

Even though this dude has seen guys in real life doing "everything" shown in the original vid, he still wonders if it was staged. Interestingly, he mentions having a female friend who changed the way she dresses because men in her neighbourhood "won't take no for an answer"; he then guesses that probably some other hypothetical girl would happily swap places with her. That's the funny thing, people keep talking about all the women who would love to get catcalled all day, but wherever these ladies are hiding, they're certainly not making their presence known anywhere on the world wide web. Hmm...  

Meanwhile a well-muscled young man makes the point that he gets harassed too; one astute commenter notes: "Yes, he was gawked at. Yes, people made comments that he did not ask for. That's about the only part of this video that aligns with the original. But, at any time did he seem threatened? When he ignored someone, he was never told to be grateful for the compliment. Instead, the only girl who actually approached him ACCEPTED HIS SILENCE AS BEING UNINTERESTED AND WENT ON HER WAY. No one challenged his silence or got upset with him for it. If the men in the original video did the same, I'd call that a step up."

For the average man, rather than trying to picture women chasing you with wolf whistles (which turn into "Well, you're fat anyway" abuse if not acknowledged), perhaps it will make more sense with this scenario: imagine you're popping into town (wearing jeans even though it's summer, because you don't want anyone to see your legs and think you were asking for it) and some guy who's twice your size and would clearly have the upper hand if it came to a physical fight, starts yelling about what a nice butt you have. Then another dude a little further down tries to get your number: "You don't wanna talk to me? Screw you then!"

Do these sound like delightful, day-brightening compliments? Really?

Saying you have a boyfriend has long been considered the get-out-of-harrassment-free card; I used it just the other day when a friendly cyclist decided that I must be "lonely" because I was walking on my own though the park in glorious October sunshine. I now feel vaguely guilty for reinforcing the unspoken rule that only being owned by another man is an acceptable excuse for getting out of an unwanted conversation. (Let's face it, not using the line isn't necessarily going to create a dangerous situation, but it feels more polite than saying "I don't find you remotely attractive.")

So what's a boy to do if he wants to make the acquaintance of a pretty girl on the street? Being charitable, I think the guys in the video who offer a simple "Good evening" are at least saying something that a women could respond to if she wished, which is more than I can say about "Hey look it there!" or the many repetitions of "Day-um!" Even telling a girl she's looking lovely MIGHT work if you look her in the eye while you say it and then make your exit immediately so she knows you're expressing sincere admiration rather than being a stalker who's going to hassle her for a phone number. 

Some pestering is more entertaining than annoying (I sometimes walk past an elderly gentleman who literally rubs his own knees and says "Ooh, lovely!" at the sight of a female) but NOBODY likes the kind of plonker who yells out random orders to "Smile!" So why do all these men persist, when it's clear that heckling women isn't an effective method of getting their attention?

This awesomely helpful cartoon raises an interesting point: are women who dare to walk about unchaperoned in public "fair game" because men consider the street their "territory"? I've noticed that a group of teenage boys in an otherwise deserted street will ALWAYS feel the need to speak to women walking past them; it's almost as if the presence of a female is a silent challenge – and by not acknowledging it, those fragile teenage egos could be damaged in some way.

They're more afraid of you than you are of them...

So is it really so terrible if men relentlessly congratulate women on their looks? One commenter over at Jezebel put it like this: 

"One of the many ironic and rage-inducing aspects of some men's response to this video, is that if each of these guys were pan-handlers, or street performers approaching them (some with a polite "excuse me" ... and some others following them while persistently asking or yelling "look at that suit! I know you got $5 to spare, stop being stingy!!"), they would be RAILING about how someone can't even walk the streets in NYC without getting "harassed." 

When you point out that "Hey, all you have to do is say 'no'" or "How will someone know you aren't interested in buying an umbrella if they don't ask?" or ..."So I guess capitalism is dead now" They would steadfastly assert that this is not at all the same, and no one ever wants to be approached like that on the street. They would say there are stores you can go to where it is reasonable to approach people for sales... and that they should be limited in their solicitations to appropriate times and places and not when individuals are trapped on the subway or so obviously just trying to go about their day unaccosted."

You know how your heart sinks when you see a chugger? 
That's how women feel when they have to walk past a building site.

  
If you're not a regular internet dweller the recent shenanigans of #Gamergate may have passed you by; in a nutshell, some of the men who play video games want to put up a big sign saying "No girlz allowed." Although we'd like to think that such overt sexism is rare, videos like this one from Always show that the anti-female messages are so insidious that they're often just laughed off as harmless.

Meanwhile, the Daily mail has been clapping its hands in glee (This is what a chump looks like! Lol!) at the Schadenfreude-tastic news that the "This is what a feminist looks like" t-shirts were actually made by women in a sweatshop. Earlier a writer deriding the campaign claimed "a man can’t be a feminist", because apparently they don't allow Daily Mail columnists access to dictionaries. I know I keep banging on about this, but a feminist is someone who believes that men and women should have equal rights. Despite all the people who think it means "feminazi" (because of course nazis were all about equal opportunities), the original meaning hasn't changed. So if you find yourself thinking that all this "feminist" talk has got out of hand, remember that if you and the dictionary disagree on the true definition of a word, it's not the dictionary who's got it wrong. 

For all the men who think women's rights = misandry, we can call feminism "egalitarianism" if it makes you feel better – but let's not pretend that we've already reached the heights of equality.

ETA: The best internet response to the whole debate began with this Twitter exchange:

Elon James White (CEO of This Week in Blackness) took this suggestion and ran with it, spawning the #dudesgreetingdudes hashtag and a million hilarious scenarios which could change the world in an entertaining-yet-passive-aggressive way. Let's do this, boys.