&NOW 2018

The conventions of the traditional thriller employ a patriarchal mode where suspense is managed, creating a trajectory that builds to climax in which previously inexplicable plot events become fully mansplained. In experimental thrillers, such a path becomes an orbit rather than a strict narrative; these thrillers thrive when nothing is revealed and the reader is, instead, led into an experience of increasing stress, uncertainty, and trauma, until her own psychic boundaries are crossed and a realm of true mystery penetrated. Our quotidian sense of the world is not reinforced, as in the masculine realism of the traditional thriller, but shaken until we begin to question our very ability to read clues and create order out of language. In this proposed event, we will begin with a quick exploration of the secret lineage of the experimental thriller, including seminal works by Kafka, Grand Master Margaret Millar, and Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. Each writer will further expound on a particular element of the experimental thriller and perform an artwork-in-progress that strives to demonstrate convention-shattering principles such as climax deferral, plot ruin, dialogue obfuscation, and anti-characterization.