Humans have a thirst for knowledge meaning that when we’re presented with the works of thrillers we can’t help but need more to glut out until our questions are answered, but all the while, our minds remain passive. This thought stems from Wordsworth and Coleridge’s analysis that the gothic genre is simply a commodifying form of writing. The Romantic pair professed that our intellect isn’t stimulated, but instead our minds are dulled, when we glut on this ‘passive’ fiction. Their thoughts reiterate the philosophical differentiation of the nurturing of the mind against giving into bodily desires such as lust. The authors of thriller books manipulate our innate desire to know more. ‘I am Pilgrim’ is a novel that has engaged and continues to engage millions of people. Like Harry in the Chamber of Secrets, we are literally sucked into the pages of this dark book. The author, Terry Hayes, locks in our interest by the meandering narratives. The transfers are so swift that we have no choice but to advance, as our conventional end of chapter cliff-hanger isn’t answered straight away but after some further progress of the surrounding sub-plots. This allows the reader to simultaneously delve into the details of different people in different places with different purposes, but all with the same intrinsic link: Pilgrim and with a series of never-ending questions. Pilgrim or otherwise known as Scott Murdoch, Jude Garrett and the list goes on, in short, has every Cherub-obsessed child’s dream job: a spy. The first-person narrative means we get to play detective alongside him. We get to try and glue together the odd clue. We get to find the answers to satisfy our burning lust for more knowledge. We may say we ‘love’ thriller novels but is this a genuine sort of love or a burning and unhealthy passion? As Angela Carter’s Puss in Boots says in her series of short stories The Bloody Chamber: ‘Love is desire sustained by unfulfillment’. Therefore, our thriller novel page turners are not actively intellectual or stimulating but addictive as they are driven by our desire to know more, usually: who’s the killer? In this way, Coleridge rightly, although extremely, compares reading thriller novels to the effects of drugs, almost as so though they are leeching onto our human weaknesses keeping us passive, lustful and gluttonous but far from intellectual.

Interesting argument. However, I disagree with this statement and I will refer to the example of Coleridge and Wordsworth to do so. It is true that Romantics like Coleridge and Wordsworth find Gothic horror fiction to be inviting readers towards a 'pleasurable' partaking of degrading fiction and spectacle. However, their own actions and writings say otherwise. From a very early age, both Coleridge and Wordsworth read a huge amount of thriller Gothic novels, and their own writing is influenced by them to a great extent. Most of their poems have Gothic elements and refer to Gothic scary tropes. Their kinds of Romanticism is hugely Gothic and they studied the feeling of fear in their writings. Medieval settings, Gothic castles, villains, supernatural beings, demons, etc. have been intellectually stimulating for them and for their readers and creep into their writing whether they like it or not. Also, some of the best poetry by Coleridge revolves around his experiences with opium and the turbulent dreams that they induced for Coleridge, and opium taking had both a narcotic and stimulating effect for Coleridge's poetic identity. They were actually challenged by this genre into making a discussion with dark fiction, which rendered their minds and their readers' minds not passive but vividly active. It is not random that Wordsworth's pedagogy was based on both beauty and fear as he mentions in his Prelude (1805).

It seems that your case pushes that thrillers are gluttonous, not intellectually stimulating and thus, a negative reading experience. I don't believe that reading and writing can inherently be anything besides actively intellectual. Kurt Vonnegut says, “By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well." Intellect engages a person's power to *know* without an immediate turn to feeling. Something may never be entirely known, but the act of engaging still remains – emotional or not. A thriller written with attention-grabbing details, though stimulating to our emotions and feelings regardless, provides the same layout of information to the most logical and emotional thinkers alike. A story is conducted – piecing it together may just be intellectual in itself. Non-fiction thrillers like Capote's *In Cold Blood* should not be overlooked. Readers with a detailed understanding of the Clutter family murders, I assume, would compare the writing consistently with their knowledge. Is it truly unfulfilling to want to know more? Is it possible to be passive to a story broken down and building on itself? As for fiction, thriller author L.A. Larkin states, "I believe that one of the reasons why crime fiction is so popular is that it allows us to wrestle with the big issues of our time in the context of a work of fiction, which acts like a safety net because we know it isn’t real." It would be difficult not to grapple with the topics that thrillers portray in comparison to all that we learn from various social movements and ethical dilemmas every day. However, thrillers do require an emotional investment. Author Brad Taylor answered "What makes a good thriller?" by noting, "They [readers] only care if that bomb is going to harm someone they’ve invested emotional energy in — and that is the character of the story." It does not undermine the intellectual necessity to understand and consider the rooted elements in a thriller. https://medium.com/publishous/kurt-vonneguts-lessons-on-writing-and-life-633a17097931 https://www.criminalelement.com/why-are-crime-thrillers-so-popular/ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/21/books/review/brad-taylor-by-the-book-interview.html