When Faye Heron flies from L.A. to her alma mater in New York’s Finger Lakes region, it’s a homecoming of the saddest kind: the funeral for her beloved film professor and mentor, Patrick Toner (PT for short). It’s been 12 years since Faye left New York and her then-boyfriend, Henry Spalding, to pursue a career in film and television. Now, she’s an accomplished writer-actor-director and half of an A-list Hollywood power couple with loads of money and clout.
Faye’s career first soared into the stratosphere when she immortalized her tumultuous breakup with Henry in an Emmy-winning episode of a popular TV show. She cannot imagine anything more ghastly than seeing Henry “for the first time since I left him in a near-catatonic state on the side of a country road while we are ladling balsamic vinaigrette onto our mixed-greens salads.” But see him she must, because Henry is PT’s nephew.
Clearly, this gathering in PT’s honor involves some potential land mines, but Faye is drawn to the tension simmering beneath the somber greetings and social niceties. She wonders if Henry’s seen the TV show: “I suppose if you only watched the episode, you would believe that Henry is the one who owes me an apology,” she muses. “It’s not that he doesn’t; it’s just that I am nowhere near blameless.”
The full story, in all its toxic and titillating glory, is tantalizingly unspooled by Jessica Knoll in her provocative new psychological thriller, Helpless.
“Why is this a turn-on for me? Why is it a turn-on for so many women?”
Fans of Knoll know her 2015 debut, Luckiest Girl Alive, was an instant bestseller, Edgar Award nominee for Best First Novel and the basis of a 2022 Netflix film also written by Knoll. Her second book, 2018’s bestselling The Favorite Sister, explored the complicated, sometimes deadly, allure of reality TV. And in 2023, Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel Bright Young Women was also a hit, thanks to its unflinching examination of the societal tendency to mythologize male serial killers (in this case, Ted Bundy) rather than centering female victims and survivors.
“Something that really gets under my skin,” Knoll says, “is when a certain narrative takes hold and it’s regarded many years later as the cemented truth, but there’s actually a version of that story that people don’t know.”
In Helpless, Faye shines a spotlight on her relationship with Henry via her art: what they were like as a couple, what went wrong, how she carried on afterward. Yet, she thinks early on in the book, she’s “petrified” to see him. Finding out why is both a wild ride and an interesting exploration of the notion of living well as the best revenge. After all, we don’t necessarily consider what would happen if the person left in the proverbial dust were to later reencounter the person enjoying said revenge. Would such a reunion be cathartic, or more in the realm of catastrophic?
In this case, it’s the latter, and Henry and Faye’s interaction very much goes south. “There is so much I could say to defend myself, if only Henry hadn’t so obviously drugged me,” Faye thinks. This chilling line is one of many in a story that continually ratchets up the suspense as Henry kidnaps Faye, takes her to an isolated cabin in the Adirondack wilderness and kicks off a twisted weeklong reunion featuring darkly erotic sex, shocking revelations, blackmail and murder.
“I feel like Helpless is the spiritual successor to Luckiest Girl Alive,” Knoll says, a book which depicts a sexual assault drawn from Knoll’s real-life experience. Both novels illustrate that your past, she says, “can shape you, and shape decisions that you make, and shape desire.”
This belief made Knoll wonder what, if any, real-life experience lies behind the enduring popularity of dominant-submissive relationships in fiction, where the dominant role is most often played by a man. With dark romance and romantasy flooding bestseller lists, it’s a dynamic that is definitively on the upswing, and one Knoll can understand the appeal of—she reads it too. “So much of what drew me to those books were the romantic relationships and the dynamics between the characters. It made me stop and ask myself, ‘Why is this a turn-on for me? Why is it a turn-on for so many women?’ ”
Those questions became something Knoll was drawn to investigate. “Helpless and Faye and her relationship with Henry were born out of me questioning this trend that I was seeing in pop culture that I was also participating in.”
During her forays into dark romance and romantasy, Knoll found herself especially drawn to the forced-proximity trope, which she eventually utilized for Faye and Henry’s cabin tête-à-tête. “There was something very seductive about being in a closed-door, one-on-one situation with someone you had a very passionate if toxic relationship with. And what if you were forced to reexamine it not just with the benefit of hindsight and wisdom from getting older, but with a power dynamic that’s flipped? Because Henry was the one who came from money and had resources Faye didn’t have, but when she meets him again, she’s the one with a pedigree and status and connections.”
That reversal of fortune certainly adds to Henry’s frustration; while Faye’s younger self may have been daunted by PT’s family wealth and connections, she ultimately benefited from them in a way that Henry did not. But her fame cannot shield her from the deep-seated fear that comes with having a lot to lose. If Henry’s machinations were to damage her marriage, which is inextricably linked to a career that’s central to her identity, what would become of her?
That aspect of Faye’s story, Knoll says, was colored by something she observed in the media as she wrote Helpless:the gossip swirling around Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles during the release of Wilde’s film Don’t Worry Darling. “I don’t want to say fallout, because I’m like, fallout from what? But people were losing their minds,” she says. Wilde quickly became the villain, maligned for dating Styles, her younger co-star, and rumored to be feuding with Florence Pugh, the film’s lead. “Whenever a woman is targeted like that, it’s just so vicious and always feels disproportionate to whatever it is she allegedly did,” says Knoll. It was just one more example of a woman “appearing to have power, but seeing how easily it could be taken away.”
“Are we conditioned to be attracted to danger, to be seduced by danger?”
Faye’s fears in Helpless stem from not only the immediate threats posed by Henry’s mysterious intentions, but also her long-held shame about the nature of her desire. “I liked to be railroaded, dominated, to feel like I was in brutal and capable hands,” Faye reflects, and Henry “taught me that nothing made me feel more alive than being degraded by someone who also happened to worship me.”
“What I wanted to see,” says Knoll, “was a woman who claimed this type of desire. I’ve seen it rarely; In the Cut by Susanna Moore was hugely inspirational for me. But other than that, I was hard-pressed to think of a character who was comfortable with being the one who was pushing for a certain type of sex with her partner.” It’s a tricky thing to illustrate in a time when depictions of desire are often held to strict standards that don’t necessarily reflect the messy, human reality, in which danger and desire sometimes feel similar or bleed into each other.
Again, Knoll has some ideas about why this might be. “Oftentimes in film or television, a violent scene is overlaid with sexy, seductive music and vice versa, a romantic scene is made to feel dangerous,” Knoll says. “And there is something about that. But it begs the question of, is it a nature versus nurture thing? Are we conditioned to be attracted to danger, to be seduced by danger? Or is it a messaging that has been with us for as long as we’ve been reading and watching things?”
Beyond its interrogation into complex sexual dynamics, Helpless also “has the traditional thriller elements,” Knoll says, “which are the twists, that feeling of who can we trust, who’s telling the truth, and is there even another truth underneath that truth?”
The answer is yes—but what and who and how won’t be spoiled here, of course. Additional good news: Readers eager for more Knoll-penned thrills will be glad to know she’s working on a TV adaptation of Bright Young Women, and that she does “know what the next book is about. Does that mean I’ve sat down and put pen to paper? No. I’m germinating.”
Helpless’ thrilling cascade of thought-provoking plot twists and surprising reveals is sure to keep readers guessing, and entertained, in the meantime.
Photo of Jessica Knoll by Sabrina Lantos.