Thriller writers, you need a house

If you’re about to start writing a domestic thriller or a horror story you should be thinking about the role of the house. And whatever role you first think of, you should probably proceed to augment it – particularly if there’s a murder involved.

No self-respecting murder mystery can hope to succeed without a focal domicile. Literary murders have always tended to take place in houses (although in real life around half of all homicides happen outdoors) but, with a few obvious exceptions, the buildings themselves were rarely as important as they seem to be now. The setting can sometimes establish the book’s tone singlehandedly.

Incidentally, if I seem to be mixing up thrillers with murder mysteries, I apologise. The Goodreads website offers an instructive – if rather too stringent – distinction between the genres: “Thrillers often overlap with mystery stories, but are distinguished by the structure of their plots. In a thriller, the hero must thwart the plans of an enemy, rather than uncover a crime that has already happened. Thrillers also occur on a much grander scale: the crimes that must be prevented are serial or mass murder, terrorism, assassination, or the overthrow of governments. Jeopardy and violent confrontations are standard plot elements. While a mystery climaxes when the mystery is solved, a thriller climaxes when the hero finally defeats the villain, saving his own life and often the lives of others.” Pyschological and/or suspense thrillers certainly don’t need all  the aforementioned elements, in my opinion. What they mainly seem to need nowadays is twists. And a house, of course.

If you have no specific house in your mind’s eye yet, you really need to devise one. Some authors have been known to build a scale model but if you lack the necessary woodworking skills you might at least make some detailed drawings of the death-dealing dwelling, so that you can more readily visualise how and where the events will unfold and keep your topographical mentions consistent.

Even if it feels a bit clichéd, the house might have to be a spooky-looking one if yours is a horror novel: a malevolent mansion or creepy cottage. Or a vengeful Victorian villa, like the September House in the montage above. But for a psychological thriller set in the present day, an unnervingly normal suburban semi could do fine.

For your book’s cover, the house must  take centre stage, no matter how significant its role in the story. No one wants to be shown the body or the dented lead piping. But they may be intrigued to see Tudor Close or Arlington Grange – and, even if they’re not, twilit houses make for eyecatching and evocative images.

If you’re self-publishing and can’t afford professional design assistance, there are companies out there whose sole purpose in life (OK, I exaggerate) is to provide you with ready-made covers featuring some gothic pile, usually observed in sepulchral light. Here are a few of their offerings and, on the far right, the cover of an actual self-published book that looks like it was made with a similar template:

The designers of the templates above don’t seem to be keeping up with the times, because contemporary book titles tend to be set in clean, not-too-bold, sans-serif type, very often employing some bright shade of yellow, orange or gold (if not for the title then for the author’s name). Nevertheless, their efforts look better than most home-made covers by self-published authors.

However, you may not be satisfied with an off-the-peg picture if you’ve devoted considerable effort to describing the precise appearance of the premises (as you should) – in which case artificial intelligence is your fashionable friend. Not ChatGPT (the bane of decent writers everywhere) but the likes of Stable Diffusion, DALL-E or Midjourney – which can conjure up an image of the exact structure you have in mind. Or at least they can after you’ve rewritten your prompt a few dozen times and told the bot to have yet another go at getting it right, after the hundredth ‘re-roll’. The picture can look like a photograph or be in any artistic style you can think of.

Major publishers already use AI art for their book covers – at least from time to time, and seemingly unknowingly in some cases. A stock image is bought and used; it subsequently turns out to have been AI-generated; artists’ groups complain and the publishers say it was an accident. But no such complaint could reasonably be made against a self-publishing author on a shoestring budget.

Of course, if you can afford to commission a classy cover illustration from a professional artist you should definitely consider doing so. But if not, I believe AI offers an opportunity to further democratise the world of books, both printed and electronic, helping self-publishers compete on a more even playing field with the likes of Random House (a name I didn’t pick at random).

Here are some covers I made on Midjourney for an imaginary book. As I had no particular style of house in mind, they were pretty easy for me to create – just letting the bot come up with whatever architecture it fancied. (I suppose one might feasibly start  with an AI creation of a make-believe house and then  use it as the setting for one’s story.) I added the text afterwards, because Midjourney has trouble getting words right, even in v6, which will be launched in 2024. But the capabilities of AI art are evolving at such breakneck speed that it may soon be able to do the typography perfectly – perhaps by the time you’ve finished writing your book!