Review: How to Write Killer Fiction, Carolyn Wheat
Perseverance Press, 2003
191 pages, ISBN: 1-880284-62-6

The Bottom Line: Maybe. Good for learning the basics of mystery and suspense. Helpful for beginners and less so for experienced writers wanting a more in-depth discussion.

I bought this book ($13.95, USD) because of the rave reviews it got on Amazon, and because I was working on a longer-length romantic suspense so I thought doing a little reading on the genre would be a good idea. My error was not checking out the "Look Inside" feature at Amazon which shows the Table of Contents – if I had seen that a good chunk of the book was devoted to writing basics like revising, etc, I may not have laid out the cash for it. Much like Three Uses of the Knife, while the book starts off with a bang, it ends on a whimper.

Parts of HTWKF are very good – I loved the initial discussion and the connections between fairytale and suspense (If you have read Estes' Women Who Run With the Wolves, you will find lots of connections here). The material on fairytales was original and thought-provoking (as well as helpful in thinking about writing). The lapse into talking about Campbell and the Hero's Journey was less so, because anyone who has been writing for more than a month knows about this, and it's been covered in so many other books, whereas the fairytale material has not. I loved the thought-provoking discussions in the first few chapters, and then felt let down by material later in the book.

But the main problem concerns how material is "weighted" in the book. For instance, Wheat says, in the section on romantic suspense, that "So strong is this subgenre that while I was waiting for a plane, I walked into the airport bookstore and found that eight out of ten of the best-selling titles were essentially romantic suspense reads"(88). Yet, for such an admittedly important area of suspense writing, the section that discusses romantic suspense takes up less than a page.

However, the last forty pages of the book are devoted to general writing advice: process, revision, publishing, etc., and that is not what I bought this book for. I wanted to learn more in-depth about writing suspense and related fiction – there should have been entire chapters, or at least much longer sections, detailing romantic suspense, spy thrillers, and such – not just a few paragraphs.

Wheat provides a wonderful breakdown of general suspense structure and some very good general discussion, but I would have loved to see comparative breakdowns of other mystery and suspense subgenres. How is a romantic suspense novel, for instance, structured or focused differently than a spy/action suspense novel, and so on? Discussion of how to write, revise, publish, and getting understandings of the publishing industry is much better handled in books like senior editor Leslie Wainger's Writing a Romance Novel. Or, if touched on here, they should not have taken up such a large part of the book.

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