The big reveal

Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne in Gone Girl.

I’m not sure when the word ‘reveal’ became a noun, but it has transformed the amateur reviewing space. The word used to be ‘revelation’ and it was always followed by a description of the thing that was being revealed.

Now, the reveal stands alone. It’s the moment in a narrative when the tables are turned, when the reader is thrilled to discover that everything she thought was happening in one direction is actually happening in another. That what you thought you knew about the story, you don’t really know. It’s also known as the twist.

It’s the moment when you find that everything that has come before was cleverly constructed by one of the characters. It makes you race back over preceding pages to see where the author fooled you. Readers these days are hungry for ever more elaborate twists.

I blame Gone Girl for this and many other trends in current mystery suspense thriller fiction. Gone Girl is the gold standard. It’s neatly divided into two almost equal halves, with a clever twist in the middle that reorients everything that came before. I’ve been a fan of Gillian Flynn’s writing since she was a staffer at Entertainment Weekly, and I have no quibble with the construction of this bestseller. I think the story is not as compelling after the halfway mark as it is at the beginning.

And since Gone Girl, I read more and more thrillers that exist almost solely in service to their twists. I think it’s what happens when a writer has an idea for a twist, rather than an idea for a book, and I can relate to that. I have more than a few notes to self with a ‘What if?’ that are almost impossible to reconcile with reality. You start from there, and it can take a very long time to make that ‘reveal’ work with the rest of your narrative. And if you’re writing, say, a book a year, plausibility becomes less important.

The key for me is to figure out how to wind all the threads together so they hold together in the end, even when one is pulled out for a stunning reveal.