Author and tv writer/showrunner Megan Abbott, above, is a master of all things thrilling,.
When the lovely Andromeda Romano-Lax—a member of one of my writing groups and author of several novels, most excitingly the soon to be released thriller THE DEEPEST LAKE (more about this coming soon, but you can preorder it now!)—asked me if I’d write about Megan Abbott in a piece to crosspost on both of our Substacks (find hers here), I did not hesitate. Abbott is a total auto-buy for me. I don't have to know anything about a book with her byline, I just trust that her stories will carry me along, deep into the dark underbelly of some world--cheerleading, gymnastics, ballet, an elite chemistry lab--I'd never considered before. Her background (she's a scholar of noir and early Hollywood) and early work in more "classic" noir (check that cover below!) lends a distinct fingerprint to her later novels--there's that moodiness, sense of claustrophobia, the disruptive interloper, the illicit sex, the ubiquitous undercurrent of dread. In a word: VIBES!
But then on top of that, she layers such perceptive insights about womanhood (and girlhood): the interior worlds where all those things that are forbidden and provocative go to stew. Competition, desire, dreams, rage, eroticism, enmeshment, jealousy--it's all there, as is the way any attempt to deny them will cause them to metastasize into something far more dangerous.
And while Abbott deals in high-concept plot—this is a crime/suspense/thriller (genres are hard!) writer we’re talking about here—her stories hum with deeper, more universal female concerns. I read a couple of her earlier works ahead of writing this, and it’s fascinating to see the way they have evolved—tracking late girlhood through junior high and high school and on into womanhood.
THE END OF EVERYTHING wrangles with the power and danger girls are forced to reckon with as their bodies begin their abandonment of childhood and how desires that aren’t fully understood can lead to the kind of disaster they’d never considered, while DARE ME and THE FEVER see girls, a few years older and shrewder but girls still, playing with that power, sometimes to horrible effect.
A trifecta of the Abbott oeuvre—YOU WILL KNOW ME, DARE ME and her 2021 stunner THE TURNOUT—are set in the ubercompetitive worlds of elite sports (gymnastics, cheerleading and ballet, respectively): Sports that are extremely gendered in their understanding, and in which girls and women must be extremely powerful, driven and competitive to find any kind of success… but who must appear young, feminine and painfully dainty while they’re at it. (Cue the Barbie monologue!)
GIVE ME YOUR HAND takes on the murky territory where friendships turn toxic, competitive and twisted, even among grown women. And in her latest, BEWARE THE WOMAN, on its surface a creepy-cabin psychological thriller, we see a woman who realizes that her pregnancy is seen as a kind of de facto surrender of her body, rendering her nothing more than a vessel, to be used and then disposed of.
If it all feels a little too close to home, that’s by design. While Abbott’s thrillers can shock, the motivations of her characters, their inner worlds and the nuances of their relationships never do: they're all too relatable, which is likely what makes her work so very thrilling—and so very chilling—indeed.
Thanks for the assignment, Andromeda!
So fun! Thanks for the guest-post/cross-post, Shannon. I've got a much better sense of her themes and career trajectory, and now I'm ready to dive in. And wow, that noir cover of DIE A LITTLE. I didn't come across that while posting Megan Abbott covers. Her first!