The Widow’s Husband’s Secret Lie is a parody of the domestic thriller genre, critiquing the genre’s reliance on plot and character tropes as well as its improbable and sometimes arbitrary-seeming plot twists. Each of the central characters in the novella represents a common character type found in domestic thrillers. Alice is the naive, privileged wife, while Grant is the perfect-seeming husband who is secretly an abusive monster. Poppy is the best friend whose only character traits are being a supportive sounding board and loyal cheerleader for the main character. Brant is the less-successful secret twin, Eliza is the loyal but nosy elderly employee, and Willie is the seductive household staff with a mysterious past. The fact that most of the novella’s characters can be slotted easily into well-known character types is not an accident—it is part of the text’s parody of genre. Accordingly, the narrative creates deliberate caricatures, comically exaggerating information that supports each character type and limiting information that might create more individual nuance.

The story also features plot tropes often found in domestic thrillers. Grant, a seemingly-dead husband, reappears. A woman shows up claiming that Grant had a secret second family. There is a mysterious attic that may contain clues about the fate of a previous wife, and in this attic is what appears to be a secret diary. Alice and “Brant” fall immediately in love when they discover quirky commonalities. Grant gaslights Alice, threatening to have her committed to a mental health facility over her perception of the dress’s color; later, Poppy seems, for a time, to actually be a hallucination. Grant is not just a secret twin—he is a secret triplet. The sheer number of plot tropes and their sometimes ridiculous exaggeration points to a deliberate effort to parody the genre’s overreliance on these clichéd devices.

A reliance on tropes is not the only aspect of thrillers being critiqued in this novella—the story also draws attention to the genre’s sometimes poorly constructed plots. The prologue’s narrator establishes from the very beginning that the novella’s plot will be deliberately and elaborately misleading. They promise that the story contains “red herring after red herring” and “fabricated evidence”; in a sudden twist that completely contradicts the narrator’s stated motivations, the narrator then proceeds to announce that the murderer is “Steve” (1). Since there is actually no one by this name in the entire text, claiming that “Steve” is the murderer is a comic touch that suggests the plot is not meant to be taken very seriously. The prologue makes clear that the reader of this novella should not expect a cohesive plot where foreshadowing points reliably at future developments and each new event is the logical outcome of what has come before. Instead, the reader can expect the narrative to proceed in a more arbitrary way, with foreshadowing that leads to nothing and sudden twists and turns in the plot that seem to come out of nowhere.

Often, what seems to be obvious foreshadowing related to the story’s central conflict turns out to have just been a random and meaningless event. The mysterious noises in the attic are just a cat on a Roomba. The secret diary is actually a badly-written fantasy about dragons. The potential menace that Willie seems to represent in the beginning of the novella evaporates into nothing when it is later revealed that his terrible past crime is overdue library books. Similarly, the threat that Detective Mancini seems to pose does not foreshadow anything at all—his ominous “Just one more question” turns out to be about the blue-and-black dress’s color, and he is later randomly killed while investigating an unrelated crime (73). When the plot twists come, they are generally unforeshadowed and arbitrary, such as when the third Lockwood brother appears in Alice’s shower at the end of the story. The narrative makes it clear that this a bothersome trait of thrillers in general—and of McFadden’s own work in particular—when Alice critiques McFadden’s writing in Chapter 2, characterizing her novels as having “lots of twists that are shocking but also kind of completely out of nowhere” (12).