When Gone Girl burst onto the scene in 2012, with its intoxicating tale of marriage gone wrong and its fist-pump-inducing rant on the Cool Girl, the stage was soon set for many future thrillers to be blurbed as “the next Gone Girl.” The Girl on the Train, a recently published literary mystery by Paula Hawkins, has been honored with such comparisons in the course of its buzzy climb to number one on the bestseller charts.
It’s a reasonable comparison: Both deal with the treacherous dynamics of marriage and the damaging effects of internalized misogyny, and, of course, feature highly unreliable narrators. The breakout success of The Girl on the Train, just a few years after Gone Girl, suggests readers aren’t done with narratives that manage to marry thrilling plots with thoughtful critiques of cultural norms — particularly those that place damaging weight on women. In a genre often dominated by spy procedurals and male writers from Elmore Leonard to Stieg Larsson, the recent wave of female-focused thrillers shows a thirst for the drama found within women’s domestic lives, and the promise of the genre to unearth the roots of women’s pain and trauma.
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The Girl on the Train, like Gone Girl, exploits the power psychological suspense novels possess to reveal unknown sides of ourselves to readers — a strength that is peculiarly well-suited to the picking apart of stereotypes and oppressive social constructs. It’s clear authors and publishers have seen the potential here; The Girl on the Train, Her, and Unbecoming are only a few of the female-focused mystery or suspense novels coming out in 2015, and many of them move past mere procedural to delve into the psychological pressures and pitfalls faced by women today. By using our assumptions about how women can and should behave to set up shocking plot twists, or by pushing these assumptions to the logical extreme, a thriller can make use of its genre conventions to undermine societal conventions. In these novels, within the gripping mystery at its heart, the inherent dangers of femininity in modern life are gently unearthed, dusted off, and presented for us to see clearly. As much progress as women have made in our society over the past century, it’s clear that many of us are still hungry for this dramatic explosion of the sexism around us.
