Shadow, Self, and The Other

Posted by Anjuelle Floyd | Filed under Articles and Essays, Musings

“A vast majority of our [violent] crimes [that take place within the United States] occur within the home. Chances are the greatest threat to [your] life comes from family. My novels explore what it means to be family, how each [family] member defines family, and what happens when someone decides to re-write the script.”

–Lisa Unger speaking on the statistics of domestic crime and that influence her novels.

All novels are about change. Lisa Unger’s literary thrillers, explore the dark side of families, those like yours and mine, which makes for tight suspense, and eventful reading.
And yet it is another aspect of the human psyche that Lisa finds herself taken with, an aspect that also that feeds her interest in the human heart, and what happens when someone in the family decides to take a short cut to gaining what they want.

“Americans hold a fairly evolved concept of the other. We’re terribly frightened of the other,” says Unger. And yet as she has pointed out, statistics show, and as law enforcement professionals know, that we face, and experience the greatest harm from members of our family.

Any police officer will attest to feeling the experiencing great anxiety when summoned to bring law and order to a domestic dispute. Anything can happen when you combine families with old, and deeply held feelings.

This rapt obsession with the other overlaid with the concepts of trust and distrust, love, betrayal, identity, illusion and self delusion make Lisa Unger’s novels interesting and suspenseful reads.

How suspenseful are the novels you most enjoy reading?

How would you define the other? And where do your stories reflect this aspect of life and human interaction?