Bold new essays on how to craft a thrilling read--in any genre--from
the bestselling author of The Dead Lands
Anyone familiar with the meteoric rise of Benjamin Percy's career will
surely have noticed a certain shift: After writing two short-story
collections and a literary novel, he delivered the werewolf thriller
Red Moon and the postapocalyptic epic The Dead Lands. Now, in his
first book of nonfiction, Percy challenges the notion that literary and
genre fiction are somehow mutually exclusive. The title essay is an ode
to the kinds of books that make many readers fall in love with fiction:
science fiction, fantasy, mysteries, horror, from J.R.R. Tolkien to Anne
Rice, Ursula K. Le Guin to Stephen King. Percy's own academic experience
banished many of these writers in the name of what is literary and what
is genre. Then he discovered Michael Chabon, Aimee Bender, Cormac
McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, and others who employ techniques of genre
fiction while remaining literary writers. In fifteen essays on the craft
of fiction, Percy looks to disparate sources such as Jaws, Blood
Meridian, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to discover how
contemporary writers engage issues of plot, suspense, momentum, and the
speculative, as well as character, setting, and dialogue. An urgent and
entertaining missive on craft, Thrill Me brims with Percy's
distinctive blend of anecdotes, advice, and close reading, all in the
service of one dictum: Thrill the reader.
