Genre Study Notes on Suspense and Romantic Suspense and Next Meeting on Psychological Suspense

This post begins with an announcement to ARRT members that the password protected notes for the April 2 meeting on Suspense and Romantic Suspense (which included an intense discussion on, James Patterson, or as I like to call him, the man that keeps us RA Librarians in business) are up and ready for download here.

You will be receiving your reminder email soon.

But I also wanted to plug the next meeting when we are tackling my all time favorite genre --psychological suspense-- in June.  Details on location and assignment here.

This is going to be a great meeting for a bunch of reasons.

First, I love the genre. Yes, I love it more than horror. I know, shocking. But those of you who know me, know I can be super enthusiastic about anything, but when I actually love something, I go to a whole new level.  You should come just to see that happen.

Two, psychological suspense is one of the fastest growing genres out there right now. I will discuss this tremendous and explosive growth with the group, but even with its popularity, psychological suspense is not recognized as its own “genre” all of the time and by all of the resources, which means that our meeting will be a great time for all of us to pool our knowledge to create our own genre resource.

Three, psychological suspense is the last of the genres we are tackling (before we move on to nonfiction and special formats and interests), and interestingly, while it shares much in common with the other crime genres, there is a lot that is different here too. We are going to work to place psychological suspense within the context of crime fiction AND all of popular fiction. I am thinking I might need to draw some venn diagrams for this meeting.  [Again, not to be missed, Becky drawing. Seriously, this is going to be one of the best meetings in terms of observing me at my most “Becky-ness.”]

And fourth, I have a super, extra special reason why this meeting will be worth your attendance.  Some of you know why, but I am not ready to announce it here yet.  That being said, you need time to read the assignments, so trust me, very soon you will have another reason why you will want to come to the Berwyn Library on June 4th to talk about psychological suspense.