Greenwich Park

Domestic thrillers take place in domestic settings, such as the home. They often explore the dark undercurrents of interpersonal relationships, families, and spouses. While the home and family are often considered to be safe havens from the dangers of the outside world, domestic thrillers investigate how home and family can actually be sites of danger and unrest. This speaks to the proximity and intimacy that better poise family members and close friends to harm someone than a stranger, as well as the many crimes committed by people that the perpetrators know well. Like other thrillers, domestic thrillers often involve crime, murder, and/or mystery, but they may also explore other topics that, despite being “mundane,” can also create suspense, fear, and conflict, such as parenthood, infidelity, classism, financial troubles, mistrust and dishonesty between spouses, mental and/or physical illness, and pregnancy loss, each of which Faulkner’s novel includes. Domestic thrillers often feature female protagonists like Greenwich Park’s Helen, but not always.

At times, domestic thrillers primarily concern a single family, but at other times, they may focus a web of families that live in the same area and know each other well. Often, they’re set in upper-class or suburban neighborhoods that are generally considered to be “safe,” with relatively low crime rates (as far as is known or publicly documented). They typically concern characters who do not “seem” like criminals, and the villains are often very skilled at hiding in plain sight. Many domestic thrillers, including Greenwich Park, thematically explore the limits of safety, the level of deception that humans are capable of, and the difference between perception and reality.

True to the genre, Greenwich Park is set in the seemingly idyllic London borough of Greenwich Park, with much of the novel taking place at Helen’s mansion and the area immediately surrounding it. Helen believes she is safe in her house and her neighborhood and that her family is loving, supportive, and secure. This makes it all the more terrifying for Helen when it becomes clear that her setting is actually not safe at all. In Greenwich Park, Helen befriends a mysterious woman in her prenatal class, at which point her life seems to unravel. However, Helen’s new friend is not actually the most dangerous person around and only alerts Helen to the true dangers that have been lurking nearby all along. The novel, like other domestic thrillers, thus explores the terror and danger that exist in places that seem the safest.

Examples of other domestic thrillers include the folktale Bluebeard by Charles Perrault (1697), and the novels Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012), My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing (2023), Stillhouse Lake by Rachel Caine (2017), The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena (2016), All the Dangerous Things by Stacy Willingham (2023), The Senator’s Wife by Liv Constantine (2023), The Golden Couple by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen (2022), The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (2015), and The Mother-in-Law by Sally Hepworth (2019).