On writing FRENZY
John Lutz
“Frenzy”
Now there’s a title that promises a lot. I’d like to think it delivers.
Five young
women are murdered in a hotel suite. This might at first seem like overkill
(sorry), if it were not for Richard Speck, who was found guilty of killing
eight student nurses in a rented townhouse in Chicago.
The
disturbing knowledge that there must be more Specks walking around free to kill
provides what is most needed to make a fictional serial killer thriller come
alive – plausibility. Fiction rooted in fact. People can tell you, and you can
tell yourself, that it’s absurd to become afraid of something in a book, even
if you’re reading that book while all alone in the soft light of a dim library,
on a rainy night, in a house full of ineffable sounds.
But there
is more here. Speck has widened plausibility. How can one reject as
implausible something that happened. Speck’s grotesque crime has
increased what is plausible in this kind of thriller. Five victims slain in the
same time frame in the same room. Echoes of Speck. And somewhere in the
reader’s mind is a train of logic something like, “God! This is so horrible
that it defies belief. Yet didn’t it happen?” Yes, there are echoes of Speck bouncing off actual
crimes that occurred not all that long ago.
So,
acceptance can follow disbelief, all in a matter of minutes, and if the rest of
the novel works, plausibility will have been established by fact.
A massacre
for openers can provoke something else in a thriller—curiosity. Why would
someone murder five young women in the same place, in the same way, at the same
time?
The idea in
FRENZY, as in most thrillers, is to pose intriguing questions, and then answer
them.
But not too
soon.
John Lutz
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