While slogging through the first cold I've had since 2019 (did not miss! do not want!) I decided to try a domestic thriller off the bestseller list; domestic thriller is an extremely popular thriller subgenre right now, and I wanted to find out what it was like. I picked Rock Paper Scissors by Alice Feeney, which is currently #1 in Amazon's domestic thriller category and #54 in the Amazon store overall.

I have subsequently concluded three things:

a) I can see why these books are popular; a lot of the butter isn't my butter, but I can see why it's buttery. Despite not being completely suited to my tastes, this was exactly the sort of thing I needed for a time when my brain wasn't running fast and I just needed a trashy read for a day when I was sick and exhausted. For that, this book was *perfect.*

b) Domestic thrillers are very much the Gothics of the 21st century.

c) This book was completely batshit.

The following is adapted from emails I sent to rachelmanija and scioscribe while I was reading.


The basic plot is that estranged spouses Adam and Amelia win a weekend getaway to rural Scotland, where they travel to try to save their failing marriage. They find that the promised getaway is actually in an incredibly creepy converted church, are promptly snowed in, and begin to see signs that someone has been in the church who isn't either of them. Alternating chapters of their POVs in the present are intercut with letters written to Adam by his wife on each anniversary, themed by traditional anniversary gifts (written as a diary-like exercise, never actually showed to him), in which she talks out all her problems with their marriage and increasingly fantasizes about killing him. On the other hand, the more that you find out about Adam in the present day, the more you start to wonder if he kind of deserves it, given that he's doing such things as shutting Amelia into the cellar's crypt and turning the lights off when he knows she's terrified of the crypt and has an asthma condition, then gaslighting her about it.

As I wrote to Rachel and Scioscribe:

It's really fascinating - I can see exactly what the butter is in a book like this, while finding it unbuttery for me personally. I bet I could write something like this, though. I can see exactly where all the emotional handles are, while being mostly just annoyed by the protagonists and kind of hoping they die.

The butter in a book like this includes:

- The prurient sense of peeking into an outwardly happy marriage and seeing all the rot on the inside. Like a celebrity gossip/true crime sort of feeling.

- Nearly constant twists of the "this is a surprise because the narrator didn't tell you" variety, often multiple twists on the same plot point or object. A small example, but pretty typical: the couple is at a country retreat for the weekend. Husband looks for his phone when they get there. Wife: "You must have forgotten it. You forget things all the time." Then you find out that she saw him put it in the glove compartment and took it out so he wouldn't pay more attention to his phone than to her for the weekend. Then you find out that he SAW her take it out so he knows she's lying to him and just pretended to look for it. But he still has no phone. Then you find out a chapter or so later that he actually did put the phone in his luggage and just pretended he didn't have one. And so forth - imagine that at least one thing like this happens per chapter.

- The violation of a stranger being inside your house and going through your things. Their host repeatedly sneaks around in the house, goes through their stuff, uses their cosmetics, etc.

- The violation of your spouse lying to you for years. (Both spouses; they're both pretty terrible.)

- Vivid descriptions of being stranded in a pretty rural location as someone increasingly takes away your means of contacting the outside world or escaping.

- Repeated jump scares, many of them sort of like "I heard a noise downstairs and locked myself in the bathroom in terror." - "Oh yeah, that was me letting the dog out."

- Repeating motifs, like "rock paper scissors", a red kimono and lipstick, and the sequence of traditional wedding gifts.

There's also a lot of "hitting 40 and having a midlife crisis" with both members of the couple; she's struggling with not having kids and her husband ignoring her, he's looking for youth in places like his 20-something assistant and gaslighting his wife. (Which you'd think would make her the more sympathetic of the two, and it sometimes does, but she's also clingy, needy, pettily assumes the worst of him at every turn, tries to sabotage his career to he'll pay more attention to her, etc., plus hints that she's been lying to him about something major for years.)

The book leans especially heavily on jump-scare chapter endings that aren't actually anything to worry about: Amelia locking herself in the bathroom because she heard a noise, only to find out it was her husband; the crypt door slamming and locking her in, only to be revealed that her husband did it; etc. There are also an endless series of variations on the motif of "you THINK you know what happened there, except the narrator didn't tell you everything, and actually it's that PLUS this" - the lights going out in the crypt was because of a power cut, oh wait, the power DID go out but the church has a generator and Adam actually turned off the breakers ... and so on.

Given all of this, I was anticipating some sort of truly batshit twist. As of about 50% of the way through the book, I was guessing that Adam and Amelia were Secret Half Siblings and the mysterious person sneaking around in the house was Adam's supposedly dead mom, who was tragically run over by a car along with the family dog when he was 13. Adam, who is faceblind and can't recognize people individually, was unable to describe the person driving the car even though he was a witness, lending a certain element of bathos to his pathos BUT NOT NEARLY AS MUCH AS HAPPENS LATER.

So yes, there is a batshit twist, but I could never have anticipated what it actually was:

THERE ARE TWO WIVES.

The anniversary letters are written by *a* wife, all right, but not Amelia. Adam was married before Amelia, for ten years, to his first wife Robin. Amelia stalked Robin, got a job working with her, made herself look like her, and eventually stole her clueless faceblind husband. The person who is sneaking into their rental, going through their things, and gaslighting them on any number of levels by doing things like kidnapping their dog is actually First Wife Robin, who is trying to wreck their marriage and possibly murder Amelia.

Amelia is also the person who ran over Adam's mom when she was a 13-year-old juvenile delinquent going for a joyride in a stolen car. Adam, who was also 13 at the time, not only saw her, but made out with her and was IN THE CAR, but could never identify her afterwards OR identify her as wife no. 2 because of his faceblindness.

So that's batshit enough, but that is barely scratching the surface of where things went in the last 20% or so of the book, when all the revelations came out. The stalking in this book is EPIC:

• Adam and Robin, wife no. 1, are being stalked by wife no. 2, Amelia, who cozies up to her, gets a haircut just like her, and eventually replaces her.


• Adam and Robin are also stalking a famous reclusive author, Henry Winter, who Adam (a screenwriter) wants to convince to allow him to adapt Henry's books for film. However, Henry Winter is actually Robin's estranged dad and a horrible person, so she constantly sabotage's Adam's attempts to find him at parties by just telling Adam that he's not there even when he's sitting at the table next to them.


• Meanwhile, Henry Winter is simultaneously stalking them, as well as having a PI stalk them and send him photos, because it's the only way he can find out what his estranged daughter Robin is up to.


• Then Amelia replaces Robin as Adam's second wife, and Robin takes up a full-time stalking career of her ex-husband and his new wife, including scheming to get them alone in the church, which is actually her childhood home where she grew up along with Worst Dad Imaginable Henry Winter.

There were a lot of things in the last few chapters that were supposed to be tragic or tense but made me laugh out loud, but none so much as this birthday card that Terrible Dad Henry sent Robin.

Henry's books were his children, and I was nothing more than an unwanted distraction. He called me "the unhappy accident" on more than one occasion—normally when he'd had too much wine—and even wrote it in a birthday card once,

To the unhappy accident,
Happy 10th Birthday!
Henry

The card arrived two weeks after my birthday, and I was only nine that year.

At the end, Adam and Robin are reconciled and enjoying their HEA after a climax in which Robin secretly empties the contents of Amelia's asthma inhaler during one of her midnight sneaking-around-the-house sessions, and then stabs her with a pair of scissors (ROCK PAPER SCISSORS, GET IT) while she's having an asthma attack.

Things that remain unresolved at the end include Robin having written her husband a series of anniversary letters that he's never read in which she laid out her many problems with the marriage and fantasized about killing him. Adam is really no catch, but if I were him I'd still sleep with a pair of scissors by the bed, or at least a rock.

(This is the sort of book that makes you want to smack your forehead dramatically and go, "Wait, the letters are the PAPER!")

Other things that fizzled in the book's vast tracts of plot was Robin sneaking around the house, using Amelia's cosmetics, soiling their toothbrushes and things of that nature ... which was a nice creepy scene with absolutely no payoff because they never noticed their things had been touched due to being distracted with the plot elsewhere; they didn't even return to the bedroom except for Amelia to grab her inhaler, the one part of that sequence that ended up mattering in the long run.

Presumably at some point after Robin scissored Amelia to death in her father's study, while she and Adam were hiding the body, there was a conversation that went something like, "Honey, don't use your toothbrush, I cleaned the toilet with it. Please don't ask for further details."

THIS BOOK WAS BANANAS.


ETA: I keep thinking I've covered all the major batshit points and then realizing I've missed some. Things I didn't even mention include the recurring theme of creepy rabbits and the grounds of the church being covered with unnerving rabbit statues, Adam's 20-something assistant killing herself after possibly having an affair with him (or maybe not, it's unclear), or the fact that the crypt is apparently haunted.