The Perfect Son

Content Warning: The source text includes references to physical assault, psychological manipulation, child abuse, and animal abuse. Additionally, the source material uses offensive terms for mental health conditions throughout, which are replicated in this guide only in direct quotes of the source material.

The domestic thriller—sometimes called the “domestic noir” or “mommy thriller”—is a popular and fast-growing subgenre of the thriller genre. Instead of focusing on supernatural or outlandish violence, domestic thrillers focus on the horrors within the domestic sphere that can happen to everyday people and families. In The Perfect Son, Erika spends a great deal of time balancing her unusual circumstances against the demands of typical family and social demands, such as attending PTA meetings and debate competitions or making breakfast. Often, these thrillers focus on violence within families and tight-knit communities, and “are played out in familiar environments with characters and threads that make the stories relatable even when reaching into the darkest recesses most stories of such environments hide or gloss over” (Moore, K. “What Is a Domestic Thriller?” Mystery and Suspense Magazine, 2020). This relatability, critics assert, makes the story feel more believable, allowing readers to imagine the events of the story in their own lives. Some critics argue that the surge in domestic thrillers’ popularity suggests readers are seeking more stories that allow them to explore their own dark impulses.

Despite domestic thrillers’ recent popularity, the subgenre has historic roots, dating back to Greek tragedies such as Medea. The domestic thriller experienced another surge in popularity in the 19th century, when it was known as “sensation fiction.” Books like Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White served as early prototypes for the genre (Keenan, K “Women Have Always Loved Reading Thrillers—Just Ask the Victorians.” Book Riot, 2019). Cultural critics frowned upon these types of books at the time, worrying that stories about murder and crime would corrupt young women. This attitude continues in the 2020s, with some critics continuing to see the genre as less literary or respectable than other genres. The genre is also extremely popular in film and television, with examples such as Little Fires Everywhere and Big Little Lies receiving critical acclaim and success. As a result, the domestic thriller genre’s popularity will likely continue for years to come.

However, the genre does at times perpetuate harmful stereotypes based on established generic tropes. The Perfect Son, for example, explores genetic inheritance as it relates to violence and mental health conditions, suggesting that mental health conditions lead to violent behavior and that both are inheritable. While mental health conditions are often genetic, it is not true that they correlate to violent behavior. The vast majority of people with mental health conditions do not perpetrate violent crimes; in fact, they are far more likely to experience violence than to commit it.

Freida McFadden is an American New York Times bestselling author of 18 thrillers and several books of medical humor; McFadden is also a physician who specializes in brain injuries, which provides her with insights into the workings of the human mind that she often draws on in her novels. Known for her propulsive and twisty domestic thrillers, she rose to popularity thanks to her novel The Housemaid, which received viral attention on TikTok’s #Booktok. While McFadden first self-published many of her books exclusively as e-books on Amazon, many have been reissued as paperbacks by traditional publishing houses due to their popularity on social media.