I'm often asked what I think makes up a good thriller. There are lots of ways of approaching that question, but, to me they all seem to boil down to the human or inhumane? That is, conveying the very essence of being human -- emotions -- or the very essence of being not human -- inhumane? I'd like to start with the latter. 

You might think the opposite of humanness would be inhumanness, but that's more the purview of fantasy, namely horror or terror. In the world of thrillers it isn't what's inhuman but but what's inhumane that makes the tale just off enough to evoke that all too human emotion, fear. But fear of what? Usually, when I write, it's fear of the unexpected or simply the unknown. It doesn't get much more thrilling than that. 

Now to the former: It's really not emotions that I try to convey in a story, but rather the feelings that accompany any one of the basic human emotions, especially when paradoxical feelings occur in a familiar situation. That is, I try to convey more about how the basic muscles of the body are reacting, assuming that when the reader is mentally placed in the situation and experiencing similar feelings, it will evoke the those more generalized, hormonal emotions. This is, in my opinion, where the thrill of a thriller resides. A successful thriller does more than just place the reader into a dangerous situation. It has to evoke the profound emotions that would result if the situation were, in fact, real. The key, again in my opinion, is that the situation and the feelings being described seem really real, but not too much sol. Again, I believe there's a knife edge between thrill and, say horror, where there is the accompanying sense of being lost and powerless. Never lost and powerless. That's on the other side of horror, namely, assault. 

Why do I mention this? Because I believe that the authoring of thrillers is often relegated to one or another of the results of "falling off the edge." A "true" thriller keeps a reader "on the edge" without falling off, something A. G. Hayes and I worked hard to accomplish in QUANTUM DEATH (Savant 2016). I'm curious what other thriller authors and readers have to say about this, and whether the result of our efforts was successful for you.