Murder Road

The paranormal thriller is a subgenre of thriller that combines traditional features of the thriller genre with those of Gothic horror. Paranormal thrillers often feature a villainous mastermind who has committed heinous crimes, and there is frequently a “personal stake” moment in which the protagonist discovers that they have a personal reason to pursue the villain. In Murder Road, April commits to finding the Lost Girl’s killer when she realizes that her relationship with Eddie is at stake, and for Eddie, this moment comes when he discovers that the Lost Girl, Shannon Haller, is his biological mother. St. James uses and subverts the villain convention in Murder Road as the perceived villain shifts from the Lost Girl to John Haller, the man who killed Shannon and thus created her ghost, the Lost Girl.

In Murder Road, the apparent villain and the protagonists share the same goal: Protagonists April and Eddie are driven to solve the mystery of the Lost Girl’s identity, while the Lost Girl haunts Coldlake Falls because she wants her story to be told. This too is a convention in paranormal thrillers and many kinds of ghost stories—the ghost appears to act out of pure malevolence, but in fact, what they want is for their identity and that of their killer to be revealed. In this way, the ghost who initially appears to be the hero’s enemy becomes an ally. This occurs in Murder Road as the Lost Girl enters the school and breaks the lightbulb above the darkroom to prevent April, Eddie, and the Snell sisters from being discovered.

The origins of the paranormal thriller and horror are rooted in ghost stories and Gothic fiction, which arguably originated with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764. Horror and Gothic fiction experienced a surge of popularity during the Victorian era with such novels as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). In the 1960s, horror and paranormal thrillers experienced a resurgence with authors like Stephen King and Dean Koontz. King is arguably the best-known modern paranormal thriller author, and his nearly 60-year career features such genre standards as The Shining, Carrie, and It. As King’s work indicates, paranormal thrillers often contain elements of other genres like action, crime, and horror. This intersection of genres is on full display in Murder Road, where St. James brings in elements from each to create a complex, multi-layered narrative. Although the opening scenes of Murder Road, and those featuring April and Eddie’s interaction with the Lost Girl, are inarguably horror, much of the novel is devoted to solving the mystery of the Atticus Line crimes, specifically the Lost Girl’s murder.

This genre-blending is characteristic of St. James’s work. Throughout her career, her work has ranged across several genres from romance to mystery to horror. A Canadian author, St. James spent 20 years writing for television before making the leap to full-time fiction writing with the publication of her first novel, The Haunting of Maddy Clare in 2012. This first novel, a paranormal romantic mystery, won two RITA awards from the Romance Writers of America and the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Crime Novel. Since then, St. James has become a New York Times and USA Today bestseller for her novels The Sun Down Motel and The Broken Girls.