Learning from the Rule-Breakers

Terry Hayes' debut thriller is nearly 600 pages, employs some long paragraphs without dialogue, and is told from something like 1st-person omniscient...? And well, I can't stop reading it. 🤷‍♂️

Took me years to pick up Hayes’ I Am Pilgrim. Now I get why he’s built such a cult following.

What’s With This Book?

Not gonna lie—this ☝️ was my thought, about give chapters in, gripped by a thriller that seemed to follow none of the ‘standard’ rules in thriller publishing. At least the ones I’d been taught and studying since starting work on my own first book.

If you’re an agent or editor out there, I can guess what you’re thinking—just because Hayes does it doesn’t mean everyone can. Of course that’s true; Hayes’ background includes journalism and screenwriting…you don’t get much better storytelling chops than that. Not to mention he likely had connections in the business most of us can only dream of. So okay, his may be an outlier beyond the millions of words scrunched into mass market paperbacks we’re used to seeing in the grocery store. But still I think there’s a lot that’s instructive in I Am Pilgrim, a book I’m only barely halfway through but already feel inspired to emulate.

Oddly enough, I bought the book on the tail-end of a book signing for a different book and different author. Meeting Jack Carr at a local bookshop and getting his ‘John Hancock’ on his latest installment was a great experience; I bought a ticket and waited in line in 90-degree heat for more than an hour to get in. After the session and I’m past Jack’s picture/autograph spot, I find myself in luxurious air conditioning in an awesome-but-also-tiny bookshop. Even with Jack’s book in-hand and already started, of course I can’t pass up a chance to browse since I live almost an hour away from the place.

Hayes’ Pilgrim had come up during the Q&A with Jack; I think either an audience member asked about it or he mentioned it. It was clearly a book everyone had heard of and anyone in the thriller world should know. As both a long-time thriller reader and current thriller writer, I was caught off-guard by this book everyone seemed to know but me. Don’t get me wrong—there are millions of books and no one person can keep track of them all. But for the title to be so well-known in this crowd of folks yet totally foreign to me? This I had to investigate.

I made straight for the fiction section upstairs and looked for where ‘H’ started. This is a small, mom-and-pop bookshop (always better than Amazon or B&N) so I wasn’t hopeful; the chances they had even one copy of the one book I was looking for was slim. I figured if I didn’t find it, I’d price it on Amazon and probably end up ordering it there. But then! Alas, lo and behold on the bottom shelf in the right alphabetical spot, it sat. I pulled the book out and made for the back cover, though I knew it could say almost anything and I’d still be walking out the door with it. But I was (again) caught off-guard by the top of the cover copy—both the blurb from big name author David Baldacci and the leading phrase in bright, bold letters…

Simply one of the best suspense novels I’ve read. - David Baldacci

A breakneck race against time…and an implacable enemy. - Back cover teaser

I read these two phrases then feel the heft of the book—nearly 600 pages—and thumb through to find many a paragraph that’s more than a few lines and bracketed by more paragraphs of the same. Meaning there’s stretches without dialogue in what turns out to be a first-person narrative. Except that narrative spans the world and tells a story with multiple characters, following those characters around a time and space where the narrator isn’t also with them. It takes me an embarrassing few months before diving into the book…then I take a class and work gets busy…then I finally get back to it and I’m staying up an hour past bedtime reading a book that looks like anything but the infamous (and highly desirable for authors) all-nighter.

What Draws Us to Any Book?

Well, what draws us into any story?

Who’s the best storyteller in your family? Does he/she always include dialogue in their yarns? Why or why not?

Books—especially fiction—are like any other personal taste; it’s tough to render a formula out of what’s deemed “successful” and not by the market at-large. But there is also a such thing as beauty rendered as an objective quality measure. So is there anything that makes a piece of fiction beautiful in a way that’s both unique and replicable?

Hayes’ Pilgrim is unique among thrillers of the day. The book has a strong following and people exploded online with the announcement of his second book, now out, called The Year of the Locust. While it eschews some conventions, it clearly had something in its story structure that’s still broadly appealing. For me (as a fan and writer of first-person) it’s the narrative perspective. Even in the past tense, with real temporal and spatial distance from the immediate subject, there’s something more relatable about how the story’s told by the narrator whose head you occupy…vs. a third-person omniscient (‘all-knowing’) perspective that simply surveys the universe and describes what goes on within it. Not to say 3P-omni books are bad; I like plenty of them and have written in that same mode in the past. But where Hayes bucks the standard pattern, it seems he more than makes up for it by how we learn things incrementally only as his main character reveal them—apparently over the course of retelling this pivotal part of his life, but all the while building a suspense we don’t feel since we’re ‘living’ it right next to him.

I don’t know if any of that makes any sense…but it’s the best I got, halfway through, figuring out what makes this book so good.

Needless to say, you should pick it up if you haven’t already. I know I’ll move right on to The Year of the Locust once I’m done with Pilgrim; I don’t think it’s a sequel but if it’s anything like Hayes’ debut, it’s sure to be another fan favorite for decades to come.