What makes a medical thriller truly frightening?
For me, it isn’t blood, violence, or even the danger facing the characters. It’s that tiny voice in the reader’s head asking, Could this actually happen?
That was enormously important to me when I wrote The Human Trial.
Although the novel is fiction, I didn’t want to invent an entirely fictional scientific world. I wanted the story to grow out of history, research, actual scientific discoveries, and questions that had fascinated me for years.
So I researched. And researched some more.
I spoke with doctors and physicists. I explored the work of scientists whose discoveries changed our understanding of the physical world. I studied the history surrounding medicine and scientific research. And somewhere along the way, the line between the story I was creating and the history I was uncovering became increasingly interesting.
That’s where fiction becomes such a wonderful playground.
A novelist gets to ask, What if?
What if a discovery had taken a different path?
What if someone’s ambition interfered with scientific progress?
What if money, power, family, ego, or fear changed what happened next?
And perhaps most interesting of all, what would ordinary human beings do if they suddenly found themselves caught in the middle of it?
Those questions became part of the world of The Human Trial.
The characters are fictional. Their story is fictional. But many of the ideas that surround them grew from my research into very real people, periods of history, and scientific questions.
I think that’s one reason I’ve always loved historical fiction and medical thrillers. Both allow us to enter another world while keeping one foot planted firmly in our own.
And when you’re reading a thriller and suddenly stop to wonder, Wait…how much of this is actually true?
That’s when, at least for me, the fun really begins.