No Exit

Taylor Adams’s No Exit is a thriller, a broad-scope narrative category that encompasses many subgenres, which often themselves contain many further subcategories. The thriller genre includes crime fiction, horror, and mystery or detective fiction, though not all texts in these categories are necessarily thrillers. Thriller author James Patterson writes:

Thrillers provide such a rich literary feast. There are all kinds. The legal thriller, spy thriller, action-adventure thriller, medical thriller, romantic thriller, historical thriller, political thriller, religious thriller, high-tech thriller, military-thriller. The list goes on and on, with new variations constantly being invented. In fact, this openness to expansion is one of the genre’s most enduring characteristics (Thriller, edited by James Patterson, MIRA Books, 2006, p. iii.).

Given its many iterations, the thriller genre is defined most broadly and clearly by the emotions it elicits. Thrillers hinge on suspense and invite their readers to find pleasure in emotions that are commonly considered “negative,” such as anxiety, apprehension, or tension. Thrillers often build in intensity, increasing in pacing and intensity as the climax of the novel is reached, which frequently includes an arrest, death, or other form of distinctly “final” action, often providing closure and relief from the story’s antagonist.

Thrillers typically end in the defeat of the antagonist—although, as critic Vladimir Nabokov notes, the possibility that thrillers will not follow this traditional structure constitutes part of the genre’s appeal:

In an Anglo-Saxon thriller, the villain is generally punished, and the strong silent man generally wins the weak babbling girl, but there is no governmental law in Western countries to ban a story that does not comply with a fond tradition, so that we always hope that the wicked but romantic fellow will escape scot-free and the good but dull chap will be finally snubbed by the moody heroine ( “Russian Writers, Censors, and Readers.” Lectures on Russian Literature. Vladimir Nabokov, 1981, p. 16).

Qualities of the thriller genre can be traced back through literary history to poems and legends of antiquity, though the format more familiar to modern readers arises with the novel format in the 18th century. As thrillers typically capitalize on contemporary anxieties, they can provide insight into societal concerns of the eras in which they were written. No Exit, for example, hinges on contemporary social anxieties around being forced to engage with strangers and the fear of isolation and lack of ability to communicate via technology in an interconnected age. No Exit’s use of graphic violence as a plot device that characterizes the sociopathy of Ashley, its primary antagonist, has led the novel to be sometimes categorized as horror, which invites discussions over the distinctions and overlap between the two. When a special edition of the novel was released as part of the Book of the Month book club, it was released under their “horror” category.