Recently, I did something I never would have dreamed of five or ten years ago: I wrote a thriller. Titled I Mean You No Harm, it tells the story of two estranged half-sisters who, at the start of the novel, seem to have only one thing in common: their career-criminal father. His death reunites the sisters and leaves them facing the consequences of an unsettled—and potentially deadly–score between him and a former associate. (The novel will be published in August by Imbrifex Books, and you can find more details here.)
Why a thriller?
For one thing, I’ve never wanted to write the same type of novel twice. To keep myself interested and engaged, I’ve tried to explore fresh subjects and situations in each new work. But the choice of a career-criminal father was far from random: it was rooted in a first-person account I read in The Guardian several years ago. The writer described how she discovered, as a child, that her father was a member of the Gambino organized crime family, and she discussed how, in the following years, she tried to reconcile his roles as a criminal and a parent.
Her story haunted me, and it got me thinking a lot about the burdens that criminals place on their children—their daughters, in particular. I got the idea of writing from the point of view of such a daughter (the protagonist of my novel, Layla Shawn), but I wanted to put Layla at more of a remove from her father and give her more agency in coming to terms with the burdens he leaves her with.
I Mean You No Harm weaves together elements of not just thrillers but also road novels and Westerns. Although I’ve been captivated by such stories for as long as I can remember, I’m put off by the fact that for years, far too many of them have regarded women as nothing more than incidental figures, victims, or sex objects. Through Layla, I wanted to push back against this status quo, and I have her take charge of some pretty difficult and potentially dangerous situations.
In writing a thriller, I’m making my first foray in to genre fiction, having previously written three novels that I’ve categorized, for lack of a better description, as literary fiction. (The distinctions between literary and genre fiction are unsettled and much debated. Here is just one description of the differences.) Although characters’ interior struggles are often regarded as a province of literary fiction, they are central to I Mean You No Harm and, to my mind, as important as an engaging, well-paced plot. It’s perhaps for this reason that I’ve been able to take a deep dive into an unfamiliar type of writing and into an unfamiliar (criminal) world.
I’m glad that I got to stretch my writer muscles with I Mean You No Harm, and I’m continuing to do that with a novel I’m working on right now: a modern gothic chiller in the vein of The Turn of the Screw. Once again, I’m on unfamiliar ground. But so far, I’m enjoying the terrain.
