We Love a High Concept
An hour ago I finished a really great audiobook. My whole experience with this audiobook was perfection, it even ended perfectly, the last sentence coming just before the timer went off and dinner was ready. (The only thing better is when the last sentence of your audiobook plays while you are driving on your own street at the end of a 10 hour road trip. MAGIC.)
The book was The Husbands by Holly Gramazio, which I was disgruntled about not getting a galley for months ago, but now it turns out that it went just the way it should because it meant I got to listen to it on audio and have one of the best times I've had with a book in a very long time.
It is a high concept novel. I am not going to tell you the concept beyond what you learn on page 1: which is that Lauren comes home from a night out with her friends to find her husband in her flat. Which is weird because Lauren is not married. This is just the start and honestly the marketing copy says FAR TOO MUCH as they so often do. And yes technically you could read the copy and it would not ruin your entire experience but it would take away the absolutely sublime pleasure I had a couple chapters in when we hit the next turn in the plot. My joy in that moment was so pure. I was on a walk, it is spring now and the walk is so GREEN and I am trying to soak in every second of new greenness that I can but the moment came and I stopped in my tracks. I made a face, I laughed, I tilted my head, I said, "What???" to no one because I was by myself on the greenway. This never hits quite the same in print, something about the immersiveness of audio, I don't know. There is another perfect delightful turn a while later that also had me laugh out loud and yell at the speaker the book was playing on in my house. I love a good plot twist but with this book I got to just sit back and let it wash over me, the it being the perfection of a well executed high concept novel.
The high concept is tricky. You are coming in with a weird idea! And yes, cool, but what next? What do you do with it? How do you sustain your weird idea for an entire story?
A good high concept requires the concept itself be interesting and funny and enough to make someone think twice. It also requires that you do not have an easy out. A good high concept paints you so deeply into a corner that getting out of it requires a magic trick on the same level as your concept. Sometimes a few of them. You can't go big with your concept and then meh your way out of it.
Let's be clear: by high concept I don't mean like a Ruth Ware novel or a thriller where it makes no sense that all these people have ended up on a boat with a serial killer or a particularly unusual big scary thing in a horror novel or something. High concept has to be kind of bananas on its face.
The other thing I require is that you have to use the high concept to explore something that is actually interesting. Lots of genre novels are high concept but that's all they are. There has to be a character arc we really want to explore that this unique concept lets us dive into. You can't be all style and no substance.
Isle McElroy's recent book Bodies Collide is a body swap novel. I'd argue the body swap novel is no longer really high concept unless you have something really new to bring to it. This is a book that's pretty much all character where the concept is just our starting point. It doesn't spend much time worrying about what to do now and how did this happen and farcical antics that may ensue. (It's great but it's just doing a different thing.)
Recent novel Annie Bot from the point of view of a robot girlfriend designed to please her boyfriend? Has the character arc but the concept itself is medium at best. Like obviously there's a concept there, something speculative or sci-fi or fantasy-ish is often involved. But the idea itself isn't so wild, it feels like just a step or two from reality.
Last year's My Murder by Katie Williams fits the bill for high concept--the protagonist is murdered by a serial killer then brought back to life as a clone of herself, then gets to work solving her own murder. But it didn't give me the satisfying part of it. It was all about the hook and it had one great reveal but the rest of the book fell flat for me. It didn't tickle me the way The Husbands did.
The Husbands reminded me in a weird way of The Hike, a novel I evangelized heavily when I read it back in 2016. They have very little in common, but they commit to their respective bits and they are both great at starting off with a shot and wrapping up with something emotionally satisfying.
Perhaps the king of the high concept is Ben H. Winters, who wrote a whole series about a detective trying to solve cases while waiting for an asteroid to destroy the earth. His most recent novel Big Time (featured in January's newsletter) has a few high concepts in one, somehow involves FDA bureaucracy and hired killers and time travel. (Time travel is, like body swaps, a favorite high concept but you MUST do something new or else we will all be very bored.)
High concept is easy to mess up, it gets messed up a lot. So when you have a really good one you have to treasure it.
Would love to hear your favorites.
April books! Let's start off with the most high concept of the bunch! (These are all already out and available.)
Near future dystopia where the only real escape from an overly polluted world slowly killing everyone is to live in a "company town" bubble where everything is a little too perfect. Langan keeps you on your toes here, lets it get real weird, and finishes in straight up horror. You have to just accept a lot, but if you can let it wash over you, it's definitely original.
Two of my favorite novels of 2024 have burgers on the cover. A sign?? The marketing copy summary of this says "A poignant, surprising, and immersive read about a young professional woman pursuing an emotionally intense relationship with a married lesbian couple." And I just cannot express how much this is underselling everything about the book to the extent that it's almost misleading. There is definitely an intense relationship with a married lesbian couple but everything else here I'm like "hmm what? this all sounds wayyyyy too normal." This is veryy dark, filled with self-harm, lingering trauma, bodily functions, and weird kinky sex, all in prose that I just could not figure out ever. This book constantly had me feeling like I was in an earthquake, like I couldn't get my feet under me. I kept thinking "how will I describe this for a review???" and could not really come up with much that I felt good about! It is just weird and really wonderful.
My streak of great horror novels so far this year continues with Grey Dog, a historical slow burn set in a small Canadian town in 1901 where Ada has come to be the new schoolteacher after some mysterious scandal at home. Good social horror is hard to do (as we learned from all the terrible attempts to knock off Get Out) but Gish is smart to move us back in time where the stakes for women are higher, the options fewer, and the conflicts more obvious.
Remember Butter? A couple months ago I couldn't decide if I wanted to commit to a 464 page novel. But I did and I enjoyed it so much. Yes, it took a lot longer to get through than most of the other books I've read recently but I didn't feel weighed down or stuck. It is about food and had me thinking that we do not have enough books about food. (Although one of my other favorites, Piglet, also is.) It made me hungry a lot, which was its own little torture. But mostly I enjoyed this exploration of female friendships and rivalries, the way women choose their paths and how they feel about it. It didn't settle into just one thing but was constantly changing into another and another, which is (as you may remember) my favorite.