The great thing about
the thriller genre is how wide and welcoming it is, encompassing elements of
the domestic, the gothic and the psychological amongst others. I’ve now written
four thriller books and in that time I started off in the near-future with my
first book Sleepless and ended up in the present day in a festival in mid-Wales
in my latest one called The Festival. I’ll try to explain how I navigated that
path.
My first thriller
Sleepless centres around a desperate insomniac who jumps at the chance to be
part of a new sleep technology trial. But once she arrives at the island where
the trial is to take place she realises that the technology company don’t want
to simply help her sleep, but control it. In this book I’m writing in the
near-future – not quite dystopian yet but the world I’m describing is fast
speeding towards it! The sleep technology designed to help fix a person’s
sleeping patterns does not yet exist, but I’m sure it is only a matter of time.
From there I went
into the forest and into a bunker-like house in the woods for my next thriller
The Safe House. I’m very inspired by locations – houses or islands like in
Sleepless, the island in that inspired by Caldey Island just off the coast of
Tenby in Wales. This bunker in the woods – why is it air-tight and sealed off?
Who lives there and feels they have to live this way? The inhabitants, Hannah
and her severely asthmatic daughter Esther, believe that the world outside is a
dangerous place due to, not war or famine, but the air itself – polluted beyond
repair. The unravelling of this belief is the driving force behind the rest of
the story.
And then that is
where I left the near-future and made the leap to write in the here-and-now. My
third and fourth thrillers are very location-based, carrying on the inspiration
that fuelled my first two books. In The Hotel I wanted to write about a
dramatically ruined Gothic hotel on the equally dramatic coastline of West
Wales. Essentially trapping my characters within its walls for most of the
action (with a little trip to its overgrown maze!) meant I could do what
interests thriller writers the most: push ordinary, everyday characters to
their limit with their backs against the wall and see how they react. In this
case it is four old friends led by my main character Bex who lost one of their
group, Leo, on a past trip to explore the ruined hotel and have to team up
again a decade on to finally discover what happened to him.
With my fourth book I
found myself wanting to continue with that idea of trapping characters
somewhere but having the location be more open and chaotic – of course, a big
outdoor British music festival fit the bill perfectly. The festival in my book
is called Solstice and is entirely imaginary, centred around welcoming the
longest day but the inspiration is very much Green Man festival near
Crickhowell and, of course, the behemoth that is Glastonbury. My main character
Libby wins tickets to it but, once she’s there and her friend disappears, she
realises that finding her is going to uncover a very dark side to this sunny
festival and put her own life in danger.
Will I stray into the
near-future again? Who knows? There’s a real thrill to creating my own idea of
what the future has in store for us but, at this moment, I think I can say with
confidence that I’m very happy in the present.
Missed out on Glastonbury this year? Solstice Festival promises to be a KILLER weekend…
More information
about Louise Mumford can be found on her website. You can also find her on Facebook, follow her on
X @louise_mumford and on Instagram @louisemumfordauthor
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