SALT LAKE CITY — After writing nearly 30 romance novels, local author Victoria Helen Stone's former editor asked her to write a different genre.
This editor wanted to publish something of Stone's, but didn't publish romance. Stone was reluctant to try a new genre that she wasn't used to, but as she let the thought stew in her mind, gradually her first thriller novel was born.
Stone, a Park City resident, has now published her fourth domestic suspense, "False Step" (Lake Union Publishing, 278 pages) as Victoria Helen Stone, though her romances are published as Victoria Dahl.
The transition between genres wasn't as difficult as Stone thought.
"I feel like romance and scarier books are both about our most basic instincts," she said in an interview. "We want to have food and safety, we want to stay alive and we want to mate."
She does believe it's a little harder to think of the plot for a thriller than a romance. Since romance has strict genre guidelines, she knows she has to come up with two characters who are going to end up together, and throw them in a circumstance that tears them apart. But with suspense, she could write anything about anyone. That open-ended starting point can be overwhelming for her at first.
Once Stone has her plot thought out, however, the process of writing in each genre feels similar, she said. Something she's enjoying about writing suspense is being able to make her characters a little more evil.
"When I'm writing romance, people can be very flawed, but their flaws have to be redeemable because they have to be someone who you are happy to see someone fall in love with," Stone said. "With thrillers and suspense, they can get down and dirty and ugly, and there has to be a plot resolution, but not a redeemable character arc."
She said often readers will forgive more in a hero than a heroine, so she enjoyed taking her heroines to the line of being almost unlikable in her romance novels. Now, she can push it even further with suspense, to the point where readers may ask themselves, "Do I even want this person to triumph in the end?"
In “False Step,” Veronica's handsome, athletic husband finds a missing child on a hiking trail and becomes an instantly celebrated hero. But the spotlight of fame exposes the cracks in the picture perfect image she's tried to create for her family. As secrets and lies are revealed, Veronica comes to see that nothing in her life can be trusted.
"False Step," Stone said, is the first book where she started planning it from a plot point of view instead of a character one.
"I've always been more like, 'I'll figure this part out when I get there,'" she said. "But with 'False Step,' the neat thing was I would get stuck in a place and then I would go back and look at what I'd written out in the synopsis and go, 'Oh, I already figured this out. I don't have to sit down and torment myself.'"
Part of her struggle is that it feels like she should be happy. It feels like she has what everybody wants.
Stone said this happened because "False Step" is a more complicated plot line with lots of twists and turns that she had to keep track of.
She especially loves writing about family secrets and "False Step" has them in spades.
"This is a young attractive family," Stone said. "On the outside, it seems like the ideal situation. They have a house, they both have jobs, she's got this handsome, charismatic husband, but in reality there are lots of secrets, and she's really struggling. Part of her struggle is that it feels like she should be happy. It feels like she has what everybody wants."
In the era of social media, Stone said this is a concept that all people should be aware of.
"What you put out there for people to consume is never the real story," she said. "People are putting their best selves out there, and sometimes people are trying to compensate when things are really complicated and unhappy at home. … I think it can be very isolating if you don't realize how manufactured it all is."
Stone herself lives in Park City with her husband and has two teenage kids, one who is attending college in Connecticut. After growing up in the Midwest then living on the East Coast for a while, Stone said she enjoys the "open landscapes and wide skies" of the Mountain West, which she has now called home for 14 years.