While Karin Slaughter’s Will Trent novels have become a huge network TV hit for the author, her most popular book will be far harder to adapt to the screen. American crime author Karin Slaughter is a phenomenally popular writer whose novels have sold more than 40 million copies since her 2001 debut Blindsighted. Her Will Trent novel series has been adapted as an ABC series of the same name, and Will Trent’s season 4 renewal proves her work is as popular onscreen as it is on the page.
However, despite how popular Slaughter’s work is, her writing does run into an issue that earlier crime mystery writers like Agatha Christie never struggled with. Slaughter’s mysteries can get capital grisly, with the violence and twisted content of her novels typically leaning closer to Se7en or Silence of the Lambs than one of Hercules Poirot’s cases. This was an issue with the Will Trent TV show, which wisely sanitized the nastiest elements of the source material for network TV.
Karin Slaughter’s Pretty Girls Is Her Biggest Thriller Ever
However, this same issue makes it almost impossible for network TV to create a faithful adaptation of Slaughter’s most popular novel. 2015’s standalone psychology Pretty Girls is Karin Slaughter’s best-known book by far, with over 600,000 ratings on Goodreads while the rest of her books have less than 200,000. Despite this, it will be a long time before the novel receives an adaptation that is true to its tone and content.
Pretty Girls follows Claire, a protagonist who is disturbed by her older sister Julia’s disappearance decades before the book’s story begins. This unsolved mystery haunts Claire and leaves her family estranged, so when displays another girl’s disappearance eerie similarities to Julia’s fate, Claire naturally feels compelled to investigate. Suffice it to say, the horrors of what happened turn out to be far closer to him than Claire ever expected in an edgy, unpredictable thriller that goes much further than the otherwise comparable likes of The Girl on the Train or Gone Girl.
Pretty Girls was listed as one of the Best Books of 2015 in The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and Redbook, as well as gaining a coveted starred review from Kirkus.
Even thrillers that Stephen King recommends like Riley Sager’s Final Girls rarely feature the sort of intensely disturbing content that Pretty Girls includes. The novel was nominated for the “Readers’ Favorite Mystery and Thriller” Goodreads Choice Award in 2015 and was dubbed a “Book of the Year” by Reacher creator Lee Child. Pretty Girls was also listed as one of the Best Books of 2015 in The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and Redbook, as well as gaining a coveted starred review from Kirkus.
Will Trent’s Success Proves Karin Slaughter’s Book Can Be Successfully Adapted
With all of this praise and acclaim heaped on the 2015 standalone thriller, it seems obvious that Pretty Girls should be Karin Slaughter’s next screen adaptation. After all, Will Trent’s exciting season 4 renewal proves that her work resonates with audiences when translated to the screen, and 2022’s Netflix miniseries Pieces of Her was popular with viewers despite mixed reviews. There is just one problem with this, and that is the content of the novel itself. As well as being lauded by reviewers and readers, Pretty Girls has another, more unexpected legacy.
Pretty Girls Is Way Too Dark For A Network TV Adaptation
As surprising as it may sound, Pretty Girls is often listed as one of the“Most Disturbing Books Ever” in BookTok and BookTube videos on the topic. Impressively Enough, Slaughter’s book is one of the only bestsellers on lists that are typically composed of much less famous (and much less mainstream) splatterpunk horror novels and obscure literary efforts. While both lesser-known works of literary fiction and willful boundary-pushing horror books from small publishers unsurprisingly make up the bulk of these lists, Pretty Girls more than earns its place in the rundowns.
Explaining the main reason for the book’s notoriety requires some spoilers, so readers who want to find out what the fuss is about for themselves should steer clear of the following two paragraphs. The plot of Pretty Girls is eventually revealed to center on the topic of snuff films, and the novel goes into a lot of detail about the contents of a twisted serial killer’s collection of tapes. The level of intense description pushes past most other books in the genre, and most books, broad speaking, with Slaughter leaving little to the reader’s imagination.
Pretty Girls is fundamentally a story about gender-based violence and its traumatic aftermath.
At times, Pretty Girls is a more bracing read than even Stephen King’s darkest stories as the violence and torture are grounded, believable, and almost unbearably nasty. This undeniably makes for a thoroughly shocking reading experience, but it also makes Pretty Girls way too intense to faithfully adapt to network TV. Except as a boundary-pushing shocker, it is hard to even imagine the novel even being faithfully brought to life on streaming services or cable, where censorship norms can typically be more lax.
Why Karin Slaughter’s Pretty Girls Still Doesn’t Have An Adaptation
