Zach’s predicament is often used in thrillers: An ordinary but capable person gets thrust into a dangerous situation that’s over their head and must learn fast or die. For example, a character witnesses a crime and must foil the criminals before they kill her; a person is falsely accused and must prove his innocence before he’s arrested or killed; someone discovers an enormous conspiracy, but no one believes them, and the perpetrators want to silence them. In Zach’s case, he learns of a conspiracy and develops superpowers, both of which put him in mortal danger.

Most people in these situations would likely fail and die; thrillers are littered with the bodies of innocents who can’t handle the sudden, lethal demands that they face. It becomes the protagonist’s task to meet the same challenges and live to tell about them. Part of the appeal of such thrillers is how the protagonist finds a way through the maze of threats. Readers get to wonder whether they would be up to the same challenge.

In his book Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye describes fiction as having five basic types: “Mythic”—mythic battles involving gods (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, for example); “Romantic”—sagas about heroes with superpowers (the

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