Thoughts About Books

Analytical commentary on specific books.

Write Like J.K. Rowling: Sample of Exercises

by Matthew McGuinness on


Thanks for the many emails asking when ‘Write Like J.K. Rowling’ will be coming out. The answer is, very very soon, I’m currently finishing the accompanying exercises, and hope to publish the ebook, paperback and exercises within a couple of weeks.

I’m extremely proud of the book, as it draws out some really unexpected and helpful lessons from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (known as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the US).

Since some of you might have a bit of writing time on your hands right now, I thought I should send you a sample of the exercises accompanying the book. So, here is the opening sequence – a guide to creating a setting for a novel. It can be applied to absolutely any genre.

The Setting

  1. Most popular novels demarcate a physical space and its human community – a main stage and actors. Give yourself exactly 1 minute to make a list of the main stages and their associated communities in as many novels as you can think of.
  2. Careful physical description of the stage satisfies a touristic urge in the reader but also anchors them in a reassuring way – it’s also exciting to be immersed in a different community.
    1. From your list, pick the main stage and community that you would most like to immerse yourself in. List some of the features that you enjoyed discovering as you read about it.
    2. Make a list of any other locations and communities – real or imagined – that you have thought about as a possible main stage for your own story, or which you would especially like to immerse yourself in.
  3. A main stage may have physical pressures built in that promote drama.
    1. Run through your list of potential locations and briefly identify the key physical constraints that affect the people’s lives there.
    2. Run through the list again and briefly list any social or psychological stress/conflict likely to be caused by the physical constraints.
  4. A main stage should also have moral pressures built in, promoting drama.
    1. Run through your list of potential communities and briefly identify the key values that govern the lives of people.
    2. Run through the list again and briefly list any social or psychological stress/conflict likely to be caused by the value system.
  5. School is an attractive subject for children. Do any of the settings in your list lend themselves to a story about some kind of educational experience (broadly defined)? If not, can you adjust one of your ideas along those lines?
  6. Which of your potential locations and associated communities is beginning to look the most promising in terms of generating drama? Focus on that from now on as your main stage.
  7. Indirect delivery of background information is usually best in a novel.
    1. Think of three indirect ways in which the physical constraints of your chosen location might express themselves in the environment or in people’s lives and actions.
    2. Think of three indirect ways in which the values of your chosen community might express themselves in people’s lives and actions.
  8. In HPATPS, descriptions of place are dense and elaborate to begin with, but sparse later.
    1. Give yourself five minutes to write a paragraph describing your main stage, which should cover as many indirect expressions of physical and values-based strain as possible.
    2. Give yourself 1 minute to come up with a single sentence that succinctly summarises the key feature of one specific place within that main stage location.

Write Like J.K. Rowling – extract from forthcoming book

by Matthew McGuinness on

There’s a critical tool that I think is extremely helpful when it comes to analysing the key features of the climax of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s a well-known theory about story structure that you may already be aware of. In 1949, Joseph Campbell was the first person to state an idea that we now take for granted: the notion that a great many stories conform to a similar underlying pattern. Since then, the theory has been revisited many times by many different authors, but all propose a similar story pattern – it has come to be known as ‘the hero’s journey’. The clearest description of this pattern is probably by Christopher Vogler in his book from 2007, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers. This is the outline he describes.
1. The hero is called to adventure.
2. The hero leaves their ordinary world for an extraordinary domain.
3. The hero undergoes various tests.
4. The hero experiences a crisis – their greatest and most transformative ordeal.
5. At the climax of the story, the hero undergoes a symbolic death and rebirth.
6. The hero returns to their ordinary world to share the benefits of their adventure.
Vogler goes into some detail when discussing the ‘crisis’ or major ordeal that heroes undergo during their journey. He talks in terms of a ‘cave’ (symbolic or literal) that the hero approaches and enters. Below, I’ve listed some of the key features of the cave and the ordeal, as described by Vogler.
• The cave is located at the very heart of the extraordinary world.
• The cave will be heavily defended.
• The hero may be warned not to enter.
• The audience must be reminded that the stakes are high.
• The hero may pause at the threshold of the cave, for example to summon courage, plan or engage in reconnaissance.
• Before the cave can be entered, a series of tests must be passed.
• If there is a team of protagonists trying to get to the cave, they may regroup and recommit.
• There will be a point beyond which only the one true hero can go – the team must be left behind.
• The ordeal in the cave is the greatest source of terror and wonder the hero could experience. It will usually involve coming face to face with an archenemy.
• In the encounter, the hero will be acting out their inner struggle – the archenemy represents the shadow side of their character.
• The hero appears to die but is reborn.
It strikes me that these observations correspond very closely to the key characteristics of the climactic sequence in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which are described in Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen. I’ll take Vogler’s observations in order and identify the equivalent moments in the novel.
• The events of Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen take place in a location deep below Hogwarts – the main stage of the novel’s action.
• The location is concealed, forbidden and can only be accessed via a single trapdoor, which is guarded by a vicious monster.
• When Harry and his inner circle are making for the trapdoor, Neville intercepts them from losing more house points.
• As Harry is trying to reason with Neville, he can’t forget the seriousness of the situation – he has one eye on the time: ‘Harry looked at the grandfather clock by the door. They couldn’t afford to waste any more time, Snape might even now be playing Fluffy to sleep.’
• At the trapdoor itself, Harry and the others have an anxious moment: ‘Seeing the open door somehow seemed to impress upon all three of them what was facing them.’
• On the other side of the trapdoor, there is a sequence of tests waiting for them. A vicious plant, elusive flying keys, a violent chess game and a riddle.
• While dealing with the tests, there are moments of disagreement: ‘”Do you want to stop Snape or not?”’ says Ron when he’s challenged on his chess tactics.
• The final test involves bottles of liquid – only one of them will get you through a black fire that protects the chamber where the Philosopher’s Stone is thought to be. Harry has to drink that.
• The highpoint of the novel’s climatic sequence is the face-to-face encounter between Harry and Voldemort. This evil wizard has been a dark presence in Harry’s life, having murdered his parents. Within the wider world of the novel, even Voldemort’s name is enough to strike terror into people’s hearts. The scar on Harry’s forehead is a sign of the threat from Voldemort. But it is also a reminder of a deep mystery – Voldemort was badly damaged when he last tried to kill Harry.
• In the Sorting Hat episode, earlier in the novel, it became clear that Harry had the potential to follow an evil path as a hanger-on of Voldemort. This is the inner struggle that the conflict in Chapter Seventeen acts out. In fact, J.K. Rowling includes a metaphor that perfectly describes a human soul that has lost the battle with its shadow side: Quirrell hosting Voldemort on the back of his head.
• Harry falls unconscious during the struggle with Quirrell/Voldemort but comes round and finds himself safe with Dumbledore.
Of course, we can’t separate the climactic sequence of the novel from the story that precedes it. If we consider the main body of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, it too has many points of correspondence with the journey described by Vogler and others: Harry is called out of his ordinary life with the Dursleys into the extraordinary world of Hogwarts, where he undergoes the various challenges associated with the Bildungsroman, Fantasy and Mystery plots.
However, I think it’s unwise to treat ‘the hero’s journey’ as a key that unlocks every aspect of a story. It can blind you to the many other ways of analysing a text and cause you gloss over the unique aspects of an author’s achievement. There is also a tendency I’ve observed (and occasionally fallen victim to) for literary critics to twist and distort stories in order to make them fit Vogler’s pattern. You only have to ask yourself, what is the climax stage of ‘the hero’s journey’ in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone if the confrontation with Voldemort is to be considered the crisis stage. The novel is over and done within a few pages of the showdown. Maybe you could argue that the events in the forbidden forest are the true crisis stage, which would make the clash with Voldemort the climax stage. But that doesn’t really stand up to a close comparison of Vogler’s descriptions and the detail of the novel, and, in any case, that way madness lies!
That said, I do think this influential theory helps us to see what makes the climactic sequence of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone so effective. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that J.K. Rowling has read the Vogler book, or something like it. It’s certainly no surprise to me that most of the subsequent Harry Potter books have a similar final encounter with evil.

Write Like Stephen King

by Matthew McGuinness on

I hope you all had a great summer. I’ve been hard at work on the next volume in the Popular Fiction Masterclass series. It’s called Write Like Stephen King: A study guide focusing on the novel IT. And the good news is, it should be out within the month. I’ve completed the text and the cover art has been commissioned.

To be notified as soon as the book’s available, you can register at http://popularfictionmasterclass.com (sign up to download the free book ‘Ten Unusual Tips for Writers’).

But to give you a taste of what’s to come, I thought I might post part of the first chapter …

Anxiety

Stephen King’s IT has affected the imaginations of readers and filmgoers to a truly extraordinary degree. Although the book isn’t the origin of that familiar popular-cultural motif ‘the scary clown’, the notion that clowns are dark and threatening characters did take a much stronger hold on the popular consciousness after King’s terrifying creation Pennywise reared his orange-tufted head in 1986. You would have to turn to the novel Dracula or the movie Jaws to find another horror creation that had been so successful in giving people’s fears a new shape. And even then, there’s clearly a reason to be scared of vampires or sharks. But a clown? What gives?

The clown isn’t the only form taken by ‘It’, but it’s certainly the guise that people remember. That’s why publishers of the book and filmmakers responsible for the various adaptations have routinely used clown imagery in their publicity. It’s clearly the most successful ingredient in Stephen King’s recipe for fear, and the reason isn’t difficult to see. People find clowns in general a mildly alarming mix of the anarchic and the pleasant. The unpredictable nature of these colourful, custard-pie-throwing creatures is without doubt unsettling. They’re soppy but destructive, bold but vulnerable, physical but decorative. As a result, they leave children and adults alike with ambivalent feelings. When we’re watching them, we feel the experience could go either way, tipping over into laughter or unpleasantness. It’s that state of instability that makes them great raw material for horror. Naturally, no one runs in terror from a circus tent when they appear in the ring – we all understand that they’re basically a safe and entertaining phenomenon. The point is that underneath the sweetness there’s a potential for unpleasantness. The characterisation of Pennywise simply takes the alarming side and puts it on steroids, making it infinitely crazier and more terrifying than the reality.

This focus on semi-trusted aspects of life – drawing out and enhancing the features that are already slightly threatening – is a standard technique in the horror genre. Think of Hitchcock’s film The Birds, based on a story by Daphne du Maurier, with its terrifying sparrows, crows, seagulls and even chickens. Our feathered friends may not be an obvious source of danger in real life, but in large flocks they display a mysterious group intelligence. Their scaly feet, beady eyes and quick movements are also somewhat unpleasant. The film takes those characteristics and turns up the volume on them until they become truly scary.

Consider, also, the 1976 supernatural thriller movie The Omen, which gradually reveals that Damian, a little boy with a mischievous glint in his eye, is in fact a satanic incarnation. It’s something that one might say jokingly about a naughty child, that he’s the devil incarnate. But in the movie, that slightly negative feeling towards a child is made concrete and larger than life.

Stephen King has deployed the same technique to great effect in a number of his novels. In Cujo, and Pet Sematary, for example, family pets are the source of fear. It’s easy to see how some people develop negative feelings about dogs, for example, if they’ve been bothered by animals that bark and leap up, or if they’ve read a news story about a mauling. But this anxiety is usually something that exists under the surface of more positive feelings. The novels exploit that subterranean fear by dragging it out into the open and exaggerating it. In The Shining, it’s a husband and father who turns into a monster. He displays an exaggerated version of the unpredictability and anger that can shake a child’s trust in an otherwise loving parent.

Anxiety – the idea that our nagging fears will turn out to be completely justified – is a normal and natural reflex, just waiting to be triggered by a skilful writer of horror stories. Originally a survival instinct, anxiety has stayed with us to the present day, manifesting itself in perfectly ordinary circumstances. In fact, most members of the human race experience the same kind anxieties at the same stage of personal development. As toddlers, we’re worried about abandonment by our parents. Child psychologists believe it stems from early experiences of separation from our parents, which instils a fear that protection and care might be withdrawn at any moment. Significantly, toddlers are not usually anxious about the many obvious sources of danger in their lives – things such as crossing the road or the consequences of pushing random items up their noses. If anything, those kinds of experiences have a frisson of excitement. Instead, their nightmares focus on the suspected precariousness of their situation. Older children or teenagers tend to be afraid of things like social rejection at school – the suspicion that their friends will suddenly turn nasty on them if they do something uncool. Once again, it’s not the obvious dangers like climbing trees or experimenting with cigarettes that cause them anxiety. Those things are considered rather exciting. Then, as we enter adult life and start a family, fears for our children predominate – specifically, fears about the people and things we trust to entertain and protect them. The anxiety that something bad will happen as soon as they’re out of sight or left in the charge of carers is universal. And you can add to that the many fears artificially created and fuelled by the media – thoughts that we may be inadvertently harming our children by making the wrong nutritional or educational choices on their behalf.

One factor behind the terrifying effectiveness of Pennywise is that the idea of a child-murdering clown taps into this reservoir of anxiety about child rearing. Stephen King supplies a scattering of details that encourage us to see the character in those terms. When Georgie encounters Pennywise in the drain, he’s reminded of two children’s television characters from the 1950s: Bozo and Clarabell. It’s also noted that Pennywise is wearing ‘white gloves, like the kind Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck always wore.’ So, in the run up to the boy’s grisly murder, we are being reminded of televisual experiences that formed the background to most children’s lives in the Western World for more than half a century. This is not accidental. In an even clearer statement of purpose, Stephen King writes that ‘If George had been inhabiting a later year, he would have surely thought of Ronald McDonald.’ In its details, the characterisation of Pennywise draws on those aspects of childhood that parents typically feel most ambivalent about: TV, cinema, fast food – trashy popular culture in general.

The horror genre is full of films and novels exploiting the same fears. For example, in the 1982 movie Poltergeist, the television becomes a channel for communication between a little girl and malevolent spirits. The memorable image of the child staring into a hissing TV screen crystallises that anxiety, just like the cartoonish characterisation of Pennywise. The anxiety is then amped up for horrific effect when the child disappears into the dark world behind the screen. It’s an equivalent of Georgie’s murder, which turns up the volume on the same set of parental fears. Interestingly, when the movie was remade in 2015, the publicity images didn’t revolve around the image of a TV, but rather a ‘scary clown’ toy that plays a minor role in the paranormal events of the story. It’s a testament to the power of that particular image to tap into a common set of fears.

Realisms

by Matthew McGuinness on

Every novel is a bargain with the reader – an agreement that says the author is going to package up and deliver certain types of descriptive detail, and in exchange the reader is going to accept it as a real world. It’s what we love more than anything else about the experience of reading fiction – that willing self-immersion in a made-up universe. Given the importance of sealing this literary contract, it’s surprising that readers are so flexible over what they’re willing to accept as ‘real’. By that, I don’t mean they’re willing to accept fantasy worlds as well as more familiar worlds. I mean they’re willing to accept rather vague and undetailed worlds as well as highly specific and detailed worlds. You could, no doubt, come up with numerous examples from your own reading to prove that point. But, allow me to focus on two books: It by Stephen King (the novel I’m currently writing about) and Killing Floor by Lee Child (the last novel I wrote about).

This may sound odd, but Stephen King’s novel, for the most part, comes across as ultra-realistic. You can open it at almost any page and find a passage that would make a very good case study of descriptive technique for a creative writing class. It’s specific but economical. It covers all the senses, but always focuses on the most evocative sense for a particular situation. One of the defining characteristics is the large number of popular cultural references. King gives us everything from TV shows to kids’ insults – the whole fabric of young lives in the 1950s. By contrast, as readers of my book on Killing Floor will know, Lee Child is very sparing with his description. The world of the novel feels thin, like a stage set. While the details are conveyed just as vividly as Stephen King’s, they are nothing like as varied or plentiful.

Don’t misunderstand me. Both writers are equally great. Their respective styles of realism are not indications of superior or inferior skill. They’ve simply made different creative decisions that affect their style of realism.

Those creative decisions are, to a large extent, determined by the genres that the two authors are writing in. In King’s case, he is telling a supernatural thriller story. Like many supernatural thrillers, it  contains elements of wild fantasy – stuff that is totally beyond our real experience. Strangely, that makes it necessary to first establish with absolute clarity, a world that closely resembles our own. If you think for a moment, you’ll realise that the episodes of supernatural horror in It would be much less shocking if they weren’t shattering a fairly humdrum world.

That’s the most obvious reason for King’s ultra-realism. There’s also a slightly less obvious explanation. Basically, King  needs us to empathise strongly with the main characters in order to get worried about them. Worry is an essential part of a good thriller. And one of the best ways of promoting concern for literary characters  is to show us how much we have in common with them. Most readers will see some TV programme or comic mentioned in It that they’re familiar with – even if it’s only the ‘Lone Ranger’. If they were born in the mid-twentieth century, they might even remember using the same kind of playground language as the kids in the novel. With that kind of kinship, it’s inevitable that we’re going to be anxious for them when they’re in peril.

The need to make us empathise as much as possible with each of the various fictional children is particularlyurgent because there is no one ‘hero’ in It. There are lots of characters whose thoughts we enter and follow for a while. Sometimes we barely get to know them before they die horribly. As a result, King does whatever he can to make us rapidly connect with them. That includes providing an in-depth guided tour of their popular cultural preferences as well as their physical and psychological environment.

Lee Child presents us with just one hero – Jack Reacher. Consequently, there’s nothing like as much personal detail supplied. We barely know five facts about his biography by the end of Killing Floor. It’s true that we receive a drip feed of information about his military skills throughout the novel, but those titbits are only ever provided to drive the narrative forward. Contrast that with the waterfall of colourful details that serve no narrative purpose in It. The evocation of Reacher is not only thinner than the description of the kids in It, but also a  less anchored in the real world. He’s not a superhero or a creature of pure fantasy, however. He’s a sort of  hybrid – a filtered, simplified and somewhat enhanced collection of human traits.

The world that Reacher inhabits has a similarly hybrid realism. It references familiar things, but only those things that can be exploited for their for symbolic resonance. The town of Margrave exists to make us reflect on aspects of wealth and power. The description of its semi-real landscape of political statues and posh suburbs is honed to achieve that effect. Lee Child deliberately withholds all detail that doesn’t contribute to it.

As you can see, different types of realism can serve different literary purposes. If you’re working on your own novel, think about the type of realism you’re evoking. Does it help to convey meaning or hinder it? Should you increase or decrease the level of detail? Have you thought about the particular types of detail you should be focusing on?

The No. 1 Obsession of Creative Writing Teachers

by Matthew McGuinness on

If you’ve ever attended a creative writing course of any kind, whether a short workshop or a degree programme, the chances are you’ve encountered a particular idea about ‘good’ writing. Obsession is probably too strong a description of this idea, but it’s not far off. It’s the idea that good writing must have a narrator with consistent viewpoint, and the viewpoint must be very closely associated with the consciousness of a character in the world of the novel – at least for a sizable section of the story.

Sound like gobbledygook? Let me illustrate this commonly taught notion with examples. In 19th-century novels, it was deemed acceptable for the narrator to float above the world of the novel like a god. So, for example, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens famously begins with the following sentence.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the season of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Three things strike one immediately about this.

1) The narrator is located in a specific period, but not the period of the novel’s events.
2) The narrator is very closely aligned with the author. He refers to ‘now’ – presumably the time of the novel’s writing.
3) The narrator adopts a sweeping overview of an entire epoch and an air of magisterial authority.

This kind of writing was all well and good in the Victorian period, say many creative writing teachers – a strongly hierarchical world in which people were willing to accept all sorts of authority figures – but not today.

Now my second example. It’s the first sentence of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel The Remains of the Day.

It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.

Again, three things stand out.
1) The narrator is a character in the novel talking about events that may form part of the story to follow.
2) The narrator is not authoritative. He is speculating that something will probably happen.
3) We are immediately immersed in the character’s consciousness through his distinctive vocabulary and phrasing. It comes across as long-winded and a little pompous.

This, we are told, is the modern conception of ‘good’ writing – writing that is suitable for a period in human history when authorities of all kinds have been thoroughly debunked.

This kind of thinking is so general that you can scarcely find a voice to question it among creative writing teachers – especially in universities. However, outside of the lecture room, authors of popular fiction have been busily getting on with narrating stories in a variety of different styles, selecting the tool that’s most suitable to their particular need.

A third example will illustrate my point – this time it’s the first sentence of It by Stephen King.

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years – if it ever did end – began, so far as I know and can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

Here are my three observations about this third example of an opening sentence.
1) As with Charles Dickens’ narrator, Stephen King’s narrator is located in a specific period beyond the novel’s events, and looks back in order to give a sweeping overview. But, unlike Dickens’ narrator, he or she seems to have lived through the novel’s events.
2) It’s not clear from this sentence, but the narrator of It, like the narrator in A Tale of Two Cities, is not a character in the story. However, he or she is clearly not the author, given point 1 above.
3) Stephen King’s narrator, like Ishiguro’s, is not authoritative. He or she cannot be sure about the truth of the events.

So, what do we take from all this? Firstly, it’s clear that Stephen King is aware of the off-putting nature of authoritative voices for modern readers. He deliberately avoids giving the impression of an all-knowing, god-like persona. This is achieved by making the narrator part of the fiction, and giving them a specific viewpoint that imposes limits on their knowledge. However, in some ways, King’s narrator is highly reminiscent of the one in A Tale of Two Cities and other 19th-century novels. He or she is not in any way involved in the fictional action, and provides a sweeping overview.

Stephen King is clearly giving his narrator precisely the characteristics that best serve his storytelling. He is not afraid of breaking the taboo against narrators with a panoramic overview of the story. Furthermore, he is not afraid to change the narrator’s characteristics as the novel proceeds, if it serves the storytelling. For example, he allows the viewpoint to drift in and out of the characters’ heads (so to speak) with incredible rapidity.

This pragmatism is really only possible in popular fiction, away from the judgmental eyes of creative writing purists. And Stephen King pushes the range of narrative possibilities wider than practically any other author. That is why I have chosen to make It the next novel I’ll be discussing in the Popular Fiction Masterclass series.

Afterthought on Killing Floor

by Matthew McGuinness on

A couple more insights gleaned from my analysis of Killing Floor by Lee Child.

1) The chapters nearly always begin where the last one left off. The result is an unbroken flow of action. Is this intended give the reader a more movie-like experience?

2) The number of scenes in each chapter increases as we approach a dramatic climax. But at the climax itself, there is a single long scene that takes up most of a chapter.

Jack Reacher

by Matthew McGuinness on

The Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child are a phenomenon. They shoot up the bestseller charts like a rat up a drainpipe as soon as they’re released – I always have them on preorder. So what the hell makes them tick?

Most critics agree that their stellar success is largely down to the highly charismatic hero, Jack Reacher. It’s certainly difficult to imagine a more mouth-watering premise for a character – a retired US military policeman who wanders the world, applying his own rough justice, armed only with a toothbrush. He personifies the kind of freedom and integrity that most of us aspire to, and readers love to spend 400 pages in his company.

Unsurprisingly, these mega-successful thrillers have spawned an army of excellent imitators: Mark Dawson’s John Milton novels and Stephen Leather’s Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd series are personal favourites of mine. They’ve also found their way to the silver screen – unfortunately with Tom Cruise hopelessly miscast as the giant ex-soldier.

I’ve read most of the Reacher novels over the years, but recently I decided to go back to the very first in the series, Killing Floor, to try and identify some of the key success factors. I surprised myself by finding a whole load of techniques that I hadn’t noticed the first time I read it – Lee Child really does know how to make you turn the pages. I’ll be sharing the fruits of my analysis in a forthcoming book, but here’s a few insights to be going on with.

1) The chapters are long. It’s a myth that short chapters make popular books. Really the narrative just moves along in a continuous flow with each chapter picking up where the last left off.

2) Reacher is an anti-hero. That means his values hover somewhere between the sadistic villains and the whiter-than-white cops who often appear alongside him. That instability and uncertainty is fascinating because he is pulled back and forth between good and evil – like the rest of us.

3) Reacher treats women with respect. Most readers of thriller fiction are women.