In pandemic-fueled thrillers, the danger is in the house

My curiosity about how the pandemic will converge has been piqued because the book I’m dealing with is domestic suspense. The dangers featured in these books can be people, family secrets, or ghosts. But whatever form the evil takes, it comes from within the house.

In the early days of lockdown, all the anxiety was domestic. Suspense writing opens up endless possibilities. There are always new ways of fear, new fears. The question of Pandemic Thriller, or Pandemic Noir, was how people continue to do terrible things to each other while maintaining social distancing. In Pandemic Noir, the world has become dark, dark and unpredictable. We are cut off from the people who make up our support system and forced into new situations that are supposed to compensate. it’s not.

As fiction about the pandemic continues to trickle in, even the lightest books have a depressing and paranoid vibe. The strongest commonality is tapping into the most basic family bond: mother and child. This duo can and has created explosive genres such as horror, domestic suspense, psychological thriller, gothic and noir.

of the Zoje stageMotherd(Thomas & Mercer, $28.99), a woman’s plans are derailed by a pandemic and replaced with a visit from her mother. Shortly after purchasing his first home in Pittsburgh’s working-class neighborhood, Grace faces the reality of paying the mortgage due to lack of income. She is a hairdresser, but the salon where she works has closed. Her estranged mother, Jackie, informs her that her recent husband has passed away and that she is in trouble, and Grace invites her to stay at her house and help her with her living expenses. The subtext of “Motherd” is that of the pandemic, with all its pervasive paranoia and stubborn refusal to stick to schedules and timelines.

How long will this last? Grace thinks.

indefinitelyJackie answers silently.

Inspiring Horror Themes: The stage deftly blends her brand of horror with an underlying crime story. When Jackie learns that Grace’s paradoxical hobby is catfishing young women to boost her self-esteem, she sucks all the joy out of helping damsels in distress. Rather than bond with Grace in the present, Jackie is determined to bring up her past. In particular, the death of her twin, who disabled her Grace, died in mysterious circumstances that made Grace feel guilty and worried that she might have played a role in her death. Mothering in “Mothered” isn’t an act of mercy, it’s a kind of mayhem. Mothers confuse us with impossible expectations and long, long memories. Mothers confuse us by claiming that their way is right, the only right way. But when we are happy, our mother should comfort us. Not Grace’s.

Laura Lipman’s “prom mom(William Morrow, $30), a woman named Amber Glass returns to her hometown of Baltimore to wait for the pandemic to end. The “prom mom” had her name in the local tabloids for years, but it’s been years since prom was long over and the baby she gave birth to has been in the news for tabloid readers and the story. Then she became a distant memory even to the angry people who attacked her. Amber knows that the present includes the past, and that the boundaries between the two aren’t always neat. After the success of his early series starring P.I. A perfect balance of noir. Women have secrets, men have power, and power enough to extinguish those secrets and the women who keep them.

Their old passion was still very warm when Joe, the father of that hapless baby (“Prom Dad” doesn’t have the same ring), walked into the art gallery Amber rented in Baltimore. is. Their affair keeps Amber busy, and Joe worries about lying to his wife about their financial difficulties. Being together leads them to new and dangerous adventures. Will a hot-tempered Amber do what Joe has always dreamed of, something that could be even worse than their past deeds?

Andrea Bartz’s “spare room(Ballantine, $28.99) has elements of a run-of-the-mill domestic thriller, but offers readers something surprisingly hard to find in crime fiction: sex instead of vanilla flavor. Kelly’s relationship with her fiancé has been hit hard by the pandemic. After many postponements and worries, the fiancée calls off the wedding permanently. Kelly takes this as a sign that it’s time to leave her cramped, miserable apartment in Philadelphia. She impulsively reached out to her old friend Sabrina through her social media. Sabrina, a charming married writer, invites Kelly to an empty room in a large secluded house in Virginia. Sabrina and Kelly hadn’t been close in all these years, but Kelly was fighting over where she would live and she was always curious about how Sabrina’s life turned out. It was all she dreamed and feared. A handsome, if questionable, husband, Nathan. her career as a best-selling author. Spacious home in a gated community surrounded by trees and glittering with pool and other amenities. It won’t be long before Kelly shares not only her house but also her bedroom with Sabrina and Nathan. She finds herself very happy in her three worlds, which surprises her. However, before Kelly arrived, another young woman had been living in the vacant room, and she had gone missing. Kelly wonders if her hosts had anything to do with her disappearance, or if she’s just hiding in her spare room to avoid making her real choice for the rest of her life. doubt. (Yes, that’s all I can tell you.) Oh, there’s also a baby in the background of this story, but it’s not a happy story.

After putting the novel aside and reading two thin books that theorized issues around the pandemic, the idea of ​​DW Winnicott’s “Good Enough Mother” came to mind. Jacqueline Rose is a semi-disappeared Freudian and a very astute literary critic. her new bookThe Plague: Living Death in Modern Times(Farrah, Strauss & Giroud, $27) began with Camus, through Freud and other thinkers, to the present day. Rose is adamant that his book is a link between the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Personal and social anxiety are our emotional backgrounds these days. Not uplifting, but interesting and compelling. I won’t forget it anytime soon. Much like lockdown itself, Rose made me think in a more sophisticated and subversive way. The quote from Winnicott that Rose chose as an epigraph could become a widespread rallying cry, “May I die and live.” Winnicott wrote this as an unfinished autobiography. It’s a common sentiment these days.

From a satisfyingly dark book by a theoretician full of pandemic themes, I went to a completely different book, Kate Zambreno’slight room(Riverhead, $28). “The Light Room” was written for children. After all, children are our future. If Rose is concerned about how we will survive this pandemic and what our society will look like after its toll is over, Zambreno’s book is like putting Vaseline on a lens. and wants to suck the marrow of joy out of forced isolation. Zambreno professes that he prefers the miracle of survival to the reality of damage and destruction, and there are many passages that make this common comparison. Her transcendence is everywhere: trees, goats, sleep, all connected to a fantastical world. Describing her children as wide-eyed engines of wonder and truth is metaphorically disgusting. Interspersed sections about what Zambreno is reading and thinking: Derek Jarman, “Walden”, Joseph Cornell, David Wojnarowich, Titanic, Elon Musk, etc. all somehow goes back to her children. Rose has more concerns and advice about the future than Zambreno. Zambreno seems content to describe the pandemic adventures she’s invented for her daughters, as if to win her the Best Mother of the Pandemic trophy.

There are no winners in a pandemic. The most promising are a participation trophy and a negative coronavirus test.