Thriller (Michael Jackson album) and John Landis. Funded by MTV, the film sold over 350,000 copies in its first few months. In a market then driven by singles, "Thriller" raised the significance of albums, yet its multiple hit singles changed perceived notions as to the number of successful singles that could be taken from an individual album. The era saw the arrival of novelties like the Michael Jackson doll, that appeared in stores in May 1984 at a price of $12 (US$ in dollars). "Thriller" retains a position in American culture; biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli explains, "At some point, "Thriller" stopped selling like a
Social thriller Three years later Kyzlinková subtitled another chapter on Rendell, "Social Thriller, Ethnicity and Englishness," in which she characterized works whose plots focus less on detectives or police as being "socio-psychological, or social thrillers." Also writing in 2002, "The New York Daily News" said that Iain Pears Riverhead's book "The Dream of Scipio" "uses a larger-than-ever canvas to construct this genre-bending historical and social thriller." "Business Wire" later called Kathleen Kaufman’s 2009 dystopian novel "The Tree Museum" "an environmental thriller that follows a world completely transformed by an enigmatic and powerful totalitarian force" in a review titled, "New Social Thriller, The