While Karin Slaughter’s 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 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
The 2015 Psychological Thriller Was An Acclaimed Bestseller
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 psychological Pretty Girls is Karin Slaughter’s best-known book by far, with over 600,000 ratings on Goodreads whereas 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 another girl’s disappearance displays 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
The ABC Series Has Lasted Three Seasons
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, ’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
The Novel Features A Lot Of Extremely Intense Content
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 intentionally 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.
Will Trent is set to return with season 4 in early 2026 on ABC.
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, broadly 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
The Novel’s Subject Matter Explains Its Lack of a Screen Adaptation
By keeping the most harrowing and intense story elements off-screen unlike the book, Pretty Girls could work as a conventional miniseries in the vein of True Detective or Sharp Objects. However, there is an argument to be made that this might miss the point of the novel, and what made it viscerally impact readers in the first place. Unlike the Will Trent TV series, which can elide the nastier parts of the novels and maintain roughly the same tone and style, Pretty Girls is fundamentally a story about gender-based violence and its traumatic aftermath.
1 Will Trent Character's Fate Has Been Seemingly Spoiled After Their Worrying Season 3 Finale Cliffhanger
The Will Trent season 3 finale ended on a couple of shocking cliffhangers, but one of them might have already been resolved before season 4.
Slaughter’s book might be sensational and thrilling, but from its unnerving title to its supremely upsetting and violent content, Pretty Girls is an unapologetically brutal story. The novel has a point to make about the horrors that its female victims are put through, and sanitizing the story to make the plot more palatable could result in a tawdrier, more exploitative miniseries. Ironically, faithfully adapting the violence of the novel is arguably the more respectful and responsible approach.
A version of Pretty Girls that stays true to the book would never command as big an audience as Will Trent.
That said, it is tough to imagine viewers flocking to watch a show or movie that faithfully recreates the horrors of Slaughter’s bestselling book. Even in an era when the Terrifier movies pack out multiplexes, a version of Pretty Girls that stays true to the book would never command as big an audience as Will Trent’s season 3 finale. As such, Karin Slaughter’s most famous novel is unlikely to ever share the successful page-to-screen journey that Will Trent has enjoyed.
Source: Goodreads
Will Trent
- Release Date
- January 3, 2023
- Network
- ABC
- Directors
- Howard Deutch, Eric Dean Seaton, Holly Dale, Lea Thompson, Patricia Cardoso, Sheree Folkson, Bille Woodruff, Erika Christensen, Gail Mancuso, Geary McLeod, Jason Ensler, Mark Tonderai, Paul McGuigan
Cast
Ramón RodríguezWill Trent
Erika ChristensenAngie Polaski
WHERE TO WATCH
- Writers
- Inda Craig-Galván, Henry 'Hank' Jones, Karine Rosenthal, Adam Toltzis, Antoine Perry
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