When I finished An Honest Review, I found myself asking a question I don’t normally have to ask about my psychological thrillers. Is this one too literary?
It’s unquestionably a psychological thriller. There’s stalking, obsession, an isolated cottage, captivity, manipulation, physical danger and a protagonist trying to outthink someone who has planned several moves ahead of her.
But it’s also doing something a little different from my other thrillers.
An Honest Review is interested not only in what happens to its protagonist, but in who gets to decide what those events mean.
That distinction ended up shaping the whole novel.
It starts with a very thriller-ish premise
Olivia Brooks is a hugely successful online book reviewer.
She has two million followers. Publishers want her attention. Readers trust her recommendations, and authors know a few cutting words from Olivia can potentially change the way thousands of people see their books.
Then she receives an email from an unknown writer called Clara Bennett.
Clara wants Olivia to read her manuscript.
Olivia isn’t interested.
Clara persists.
Then a copy of the manuscript appears at Olivia’s home.
Its title is An Honest Review – the same name as Olivia’s channel.
Its protagonist is called Olivia.
It describes her flat, her routines and aspects of her life with an accuracy that shouldn’t be possible.
From there, things get considerably worse.
So, at the level of plot, this is absolutely a psychological thriller.
The danger is real. Clara’s obsession escalates. Olivia makes a series of decisions that take her deeper into a situation she knows she should avoid, until she wakes up bound to a chair in an isolated cottage in the Cumbrian fells.
There is nothing particularly ambiguous about being kidnapped.
But the physical danger was never the only thing I was interested in.
What does ‘more literary’ actually mean?
I sometimes think “literary” is one of those words that becomes less useful the more precisely you try to define it.
I don’t mean that An Honest Review abandons plot in favour of several hundred pages of someone staring thoughtfully through a kitchen window.
The story moves.
There are short chapters, escalating threats, reversals, escape attempts and a confrontation.
What makes it feel more literary to me is what the thriller machinery is being used to examine.
The novel spends a lot of time thinking about authorship, criticism, agency, performance and control.
Olivia has built a career judging stories.
Clara writes stories.
Both women understand that whoever controls the way something is presented can influence how everybody else sees it.
And then Clara turns Olivia into a character.
That was where the book became much more interesting to me.
What happens when someone writes your story for you?
Olivia begins the novel from a position of considerable power.
She decides which books deserve her attention. She decides which emails get answered and which disappear into the bin. She decides what her followers see, what she says on camera and how much of herself she allows into the public world.
Her entire professional identity is based around judgement.
Then Clara reverses the relationship.
Suddenly Olivia is the object being examined.
Someone else is selecting the details.
Someone else is deciding which parts of her personality matter.
Someone else is removing context, arranging events and turning her into a version of herself she doesn’t recognise.
For Olivia, that is almost as disturbing as the stalking itself.
She understands exactly how powerful framing can be because she has spent years doing it to other people.
A thriller about criticism?
One of the central questions in An Honest Review is whether criticism carries responsibility.
Olivia believes readers deserve honesty.
If she thinks a book is terrible, she says so. She doesn’t believe an author’s years of work entitle them to praise, attention or even politeness.
And on a fundamental level, I think Olivia is right.
Nobody is owed a positive review.
Nobody is owed a review at all.
But Olivia has also turned criticism into entertainment. Her sharpness is part of her brand. A particularly brutal line gets more engagement than a carefully qualified observation.
Eventually, there is a human being on the other end of that judgement.
Clara takes that idea to a monstrous extreme.
She believes Olivia should be forced to understand what it feels like to surrender control of something personal and watch another person decide what it means.
The important word there is forced.
Clara may occasionally identify something real about Olivia, but that doesn’t make what she does justified.
That tension interested me far more than writing a villain who is simply wrong about everything.
Olivia isn’t an innocent protagonist
Olivia was also an opportunity to write a slightly different sort of thriller protagonist.
She can be arrogant.
She can be cruel.
She is extraordinarily good at rationalising her own behaviour.
She has hurt people and, in many cases, hasn’t thought much about them afterwards.
None of which means she deserves to be stalked, drugged or imprisoned.
I wanted both of those things to remain true simultaneously.
There can sometimes be a tendency in thrillers to establish a victim’s goodness before putting them through something terrible, almost as though suffering requires moral qualification.
I didn’t want that here.
Olivia’s right to safety doesn’t depend on whether she is nice.
And Clara’s occasional insight doesn’t make her actions defensible.
That leaves a messier relationship between the two women, which becomes increasingly important as the story progresses.
Agency became one of the big themes
Olivia is obsessed with control.
Even when she makes obviously dangerous choices, she finds ways to describe them as deliberate.
She tells herself she has options.
She tells herself she understands the risks.
She tells herself that because she can see the manipulation happening, she cannot possibly be manipulated.
That created one of my favourite tensions in the novel.
How much agency do you really have when somebody understands how you are likely to behave?
Clara doesn’t need to physically force Olivia towards every decision. She often only needs to construct a situation in which she knows which choice Olivia will make.
And Olivia keeps insisting that the choice was hers.
Perhaps it was.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Clara didn’t anticipate it.
Olivia tries to turn everything into a story
One of the ways Olivia maintains control is by analysing what happens to her.
She thinks like a critic even when she probably shouldn’t.
When she drives north through increasingly awful weather towards Clara’s cottage, she notices how clichéd the whole thing feels.
Of course the weather is getting worse.
Of course the mountains are disappearing behind cloud.
Of course the mysterious writer lives in an isolated cottage.
If Olivia were reviewing the scene, she would probably tell the author to show a little restraint.
Unfortunately for her, recognising that you are behaving like somebody in a psychological thriller does not prevent the psychological thriller from happening.
That habit becomes more important once she is in captivity.
Analysis gives Olivia distance.
If she can turn something into narrative, she doesn’t quite have to experience it directly.
But that creates another problem.
Clara is trying to do exactly the same thing.
The thriller doesn’t really end when Olivia escapes
This was probably the point where An Honest Review moved furthest away from my other psychological thrillers.
In many thrillers, escape is the destination.
The protagonist survives. The antagonist is arrested or killed. We get enough aftermath to understand that life will continue, and the book ends.
But that didn’t feel right for this story.
Olivia is a public figure.
Clara is a writer.
Whatever happens between them is inevitably going to become a story.
So the question changes.
It is no longer simply:
Can Olivia escape?
It becomes:
Who gets to tell everyone what happened?
That turned out to be the part of the novel I found most interesting.
Who owns trauma?
Imagine something terrible happens to you.
You survive.
Then somebody else writes a book about it.
They choose the scenes.
They interpret your decisions.
They explain your motives.
Millions of people encounter the event through their version before they encounter yours.
Does being the person who experienced something give you ownership of the story?
Emotionally, we might instinctively say yes.
But stories don’t really work that way.
The moment something becomes public, other people begin interpreting it.
Journalists frame it.
Commentators argue about it.
Readers identify heroes and villains.
Publishers package it.
Audiences decide what it means.
And eventually the person at the centre of the event becomes only one voice among many.
For Olivia, who has spent her career interpreting other people’s work, that is intolerable.
She wants control of the narrative.
The problem is that control may never have been possible.
Even honesty becomes complicated
The title An Honest Review started to take on more meanings as I wrote.
At first, it refers quite literally to Olivia’s brand.
Her channel is called An Honest Review and she gives honest reviews.
Or at least she believes she does.
Then Clara demands one.
Later, both women start producing their own versions of the same events.
Each can claim honesty.
Each can point towards facts.
Each can accuse the other of manipulation.
And each understands that selecting which facts to include is itself a form of storytelling.
That doesn’t mean there is no such thing as truth.
It means truth and narrative aren’t necessarily the same thing.
That distinction became central to the novel.
Why I still think it belongs with my psychological thrillers
This was the question I wrestled with after finishing it.
I even wondered whether An Honest Review should appear under a different pen name because it sits further towards the literary end than my other thrillers.
I’m increasingly convinced that would be the wrong way to think about it.
It’s not literary fiction disguised as a thriller.
The psychological-thriller structure is what makes the other ideas work.
The stalking matters because Olivia is losing control.
The captivity matters because Clara has turned metaphor into physical reality. Olivia isn’t merely being represented by someone else; she is literally trapped inside a situation someone else has constructed for her.
The suspense matters because questions about agency become much more uncomfortable when a wrong decision has immediate consequences.
And the conflict between Olivia and Clara works because both women are trying to control not only what happens, but what the events will eventually mean.
The literary elements aren’t separate from the thriller.
They’re built into it.
Perhaps ‘bookish psychological thriller’ says it best
That’s ultimately why I settled on describing An Honest Review as a bookish psychological thriller.
It tells you what kind of experience to expect.
There are books within books, writers, reviewers, audiences, publishing and arguments about criticism.
But there is also a woman waking up tied to a chair while her captor calmly explains what happens next.
For me, those two sides belong together.
An Honest Review is probably the most literary psychological thriller I’ve written.
It may also be one of the darkest.
Because Olivia eventually discovers that escaping another person’s story is much harder than escaping a locked room.
An Honest Review is available now on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.
