COMMENT: How Instagram fuels our thirst for a new type of thriller
By Megan Goldin
Domestic noir is the hottest fiction genre around at the moment. Written mostly by female authors, domestic noir novels have Hollywood all abuzz producing blockbuster movies such as “Gone Girl” and “The Girl On The Train” based on the best-selling novels.
In these psychological thrillers, the danger that lurks is not from a stranger, but from the home front – a neighbour, a friend, a colleague, or even a husband/wife. This genre is more true-to-life than many thrillers because criminologists say that most murder victims know their killers.
There’s been much speculation as to why domestic noir has become so popular. My theory is that people are fascinated about what happens beneath what seems on the surface to be perfect lives. We are confronted by perfection wherever we look. Our social media feeds are filled with the images of the lives of everyone from the Kardashians, to supermodel sisters Bella and Gigi Hadid, to a wide array of Instagram and YouTube stars with perfect figures, great smiles and big bank balances.
Blame social media for enticing people to present a carefully-edited version of their lives. Everything is perfect in an Instagram world: The perfect body. The perfect diet. The perfect yoga pose. The perfect plate of food. The perfect holidays with perfect cocktails on the edges of dreamy infinity pools.
It’s all so perfect that you just know there is a catch. Domestic noir thrillers reveal the catch because under the surface, peoples’ lives are rarely that perfect. Life is more complicated than any Instagram feed can reveal.
When I wrote my novel, The Girl In Kellers Way, it was in the midst of the Ashley Madison scandal in which the data from a dating app for cheating spouses was hacked and published on the Internet. Suddenly husbands and wives could find out if they were being cheated on. It intrigued me enough to start writing a book based on an idea that had already been bubbling under the surface when I lived in Singapore.
The Girl In Kellers Way is about the second wife of a psychology professor who finds out that her husband is having an affair with a graduate student who looks exactly like his murdered first wife. As with most domestic noir thrillers, most of the action takes place in and around the home.
While I was tempted to set my novel in Singapore or Australia, my home country, in the end I set it in a small college town in North Carolina in the United States. There, one of the key characters goes jogging along a remote forest road until she confronts something that makes her question everything she ever believed about her marriage, life and sanity. The snow, the isolation and the pressure cooker atmosphere of a small college town gave me all the ingredients that I needed for my plot.
The fascination with domestic noir is a byproduct of the Instagram generation. People want to find out what happens behind the illusion. I have one friend whose Facebook and Instagram feeds are filled with gorgeous holiday photos and amazing meals and parties. He once told me that it’s all a façade. Reality, he said, is far different.
With domestic noir thrillers. the reality is brought home with behind-the-scenes glimpses of loving relationships that are darker and deadlier than anyone could have expected. There’s every reason to believe that these novels will become even more popular because they are so gripping. There’s nothing more fun than to read a book that you can’t put down.
Megan Goldin lived in Singapore for almost a decade where she began writing on weekends while working for Yahoo and the Reuters news agency. Her debut novel, The Girl In Kellers Way, a psychological thriller described by the Australia media as a “taut thriller” and “a cracker of a debut” has been released by Penguin Books and is now available in Singapore.
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