Look, I get it - it's not necessarily the authors that do this - it's the publishers or the marketers or the reviewers. And I even understand why they think it's the right thing to do, because it will draw people in. And I might even be one of those people who is a sucker for pithy blurbs myself - I recently saw something about a book described as "'Station Eleven' meets the 'Hunger Games'" and pretty much started drooling and added the book to my Amazon wishlist.
But if you make a promise, you better deliver on it, and all too often these books - especially the "next Gone Girl" books - are disappointing.
Let's face it, even Gillian Flynn herself apparently can't write the next "Gone Girl"! It's been almost 6 years since "Gone Girl" first came out, and she hasn't published a novel since. (She published one short 64 page novella, but even that was in 2014.) So if even the author of "Gone Girl" can't follow it up, what are the chances someone else will?
And not only that, but someone decided all these other thrillers should have the word "girl" in the title too. "The Girl on The Train," "The Girl With No Past," "The Girl Before," "Pretty Girls," "All the Missing Girls"... and those are just ones that I have read; there are plenty more.
And other imitations of "Gone Girl" can be a bit too much to bear as well - just because an unreliable narrator was used to good effect in "Gone Girl" doesn't mean every single thriller needs an unreliable narrator or two. At some point it just becomes a gimmick rather than an effective method of building suspense, especially since as readers we are now primed to look for that "gotcha" twist. I won't spoil which two books, but I can think of two books I read in recent years where I predicted the shocking twist almost right away, and rather than patting myself on the back for figuring it out as I would if I had figured it out closer in time to the reveal, I was kind of underwhelmed because it seemed so obvious.
There certainly are other good thrillers out there, and I'll make some suggestions in a future column. But some books just become too iconic to be compared to. There are other good middle grade fantasies, but there will never be a next "Harry Potter," and there are plenty of other good dystopian books, but books shouldn't be called "the next 'Hunger Games'" either. Not only is nothing ever going to live up to those comparisons, but it becomes almost cliche to do so.
So please, let these books stand on their own. And if you absolutely have to make a comparison, at least limit yourself to something along the lines of "for fans of 'Gone Girl'" or something instead of going ahead and anointing it the undisputed successor!
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