I told myself one more chapter at 11:15. The chapter was a page and a half. It ended with a phone ringing. The next chapter was the phone call, which took a page, and ended with the words “and then she saw who was standing behind him.” The next chapter was two paragraphs.
It is now 2:40 a.m. I have read ninety chapters. I would like to speak to whoever decided this was allowed.
The scheme
Here is how a thriller is built, and I say this with respect, the way you’d describe a very good pickpocket.
Each chapter is a small promise. “One more” feels like a small cost. You are, by nature, a person who honours small costs. The chapter ends on a hook: a door, a name, a car that shouldn’t be there. The hook is not resolved in the next chapter; the next chapter is a different character in a different city, also ending on a hook. Now you have two hooks. You can’t go to bed with two hooks. Nobody can. So you read on, and you get a third, and the book has you, and the lamp is still on, and the cat has given up and gone to sleep on the clean laundry.
“One more chapter” is the truest lie in reading. We put it on a mug. The mug sells very well. We know what we are doing and so do they.
The characters have no bedtime either
Nobody in a thriller sleeps. They drive through the night. They sit in cars outside houses. They get a text at 3 a.m. and go. The genre has no concept of the evening ending, and after three hundred pages, neither do you. You start to feel that going to bed would be letting her down. She’s in a stairwell. You can’t leave her in a stairwell.
The short chapter is a lamp trick
Reading at night, the brain measures tiredness in pages, not minutes. Two pages is nothing. Two pages is a glance. The thriller has figured out that if the unit is small enough, you will never notice the sum. Ninety small units is a book. You read a book tonight. You were going to read a chapter.
The defence
I’ve tried everything. Reading only in the afternoon: the book wins, because the afternoon is now the night. Stopping mid-chapter: this works slightly, because there’s no hook mid-chapter, but it feels like walking out of a room while someone’s talking. Setting an alarm: I turned it off and said “one more,” out loud, to a cat.
The only thing that works is to pick a stopping point before the hook. Read the chapter until the final paragraph, and stop at the paragraph before it. You know the hook is there. You have decided not to look. The book cannot hook a reader who refuses to finish the chapter. It is petty. It is the only power I have.
Where it stands
She’s in the stairwell. I have put the bookmark in before the stairwell. I am going to bed. It’s 2:51. I am writing this down so that there is a record, for the inquest.