My debut novel, Never Saw Me Coming, is very much a psychological thriller forged out of my desire to subvert readers’ expectations. I started writing the novel a few years ago, during a period of time when I was frustrated that a lot of thrillers featured somewhat clueless women dealing with the consequences of bad decisions often made by more interesting men who were attached to them. I’m someone who was raised on horror movies, where the clever girl could outwit the much larger slasher, and found myself drawn to stories with sharp female characters, like Gone Girl or Veronica Mars.
The main character of my novel is Chloe, an 18-year-old incoming college Freshman who is a diagnosed psychopath entering a special clinical panel study where 7 psychopaths get a free ride to college in exchange for being in the study. Chloe is hell bent on finding a former childhood friend of hers and killing him within 60 days of orientation, and nothing will stand in her way, not even the serial killer hunting psychopaths on campus. She has many unsavory qualities: she is narcissistic, selfish, manipulative, and murderous and yet reader after reader tells me that they fall in love with her. Why? I think it’s because she wants something and she will use all of her talents, both positive and negative, to get at it.
We continue to live in a book world where the moral purity of female characters still matters to many readers. Female main characters will get docked for cheating on their husbands, being unkind to family members, or just being someone that the reader wouldn’t want to be friends with—something that never ceases to astound me. In my novel, I set myself an unusual goal: I will make a character who is objectively despicable on paper, and I will make most readers love her. We read to escape reality, which means that fiction gives us a place to root for terrible, impractical romances, to savor the unsavory, and gleefully watch someone carry out acts that we would never do ourselves.
I was also extremely aware of what expectations that regular thriller readers would have walking into the book. If I’ve set up several of the main characters to literally be psychopaths, people who hop agilely from one lie to the next, surely they must be unreliable narrators…? Or are they? I am very much an old-fashioned storyteller, who is more interested in relying on character than I am on playing mind games with the reader. All mysteries have that element where the reader wants the whodunit reveal, but one of the greatest compliments I have received about the book is when readers have said that they were more invested in seeing how the characters would figure out the mystery.
Vera Kurian is a psychologist and writer and a longtime resident of Washington DC. She has a doctorate in social psychology, specializing in intergroup relations, political ideology, and quantitative methods. She has studied fiction at Breadloaf, Sewanee, VONA, and attended juried workshops at LitCamp, Colgate, Juniper, and the Marlboro Summer Writing Intensive. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a semifinalist for the Mark Twain Royal Nonesuch Humor Writing
