7 Psychological Thriller Books That Are Perfect From Beginning to End
At any given moment, Scott Simone has at least three books jockeying for his attention. He’ll never turn down a campus novel with a literary bent, nor will he hesitate to add yet another mystery to his Leaning Tower of Pisa-inspired to-be-read pile — which is built upon the bedrocks of too many short story collections, how-are-these-real true crime books, and classics waiting to be cracked open again. Topics that have him ripping through pages the fastest include closed-circle murders, unhappy professors, life-questioning philosophical deep dives, so long as they feature sharp sentences, a dark sense of humor, and at least a little malice.
He’s spent so much time in book shops over the years he is, to his wife’s chagrin, continuing to build a library that doesn’t quite respect the dimensions of the apartment meant to contain it.
A great psychological thriller plays a nasty trick on its reader: You’re comfortably reading along. The plot seems straightforward. You love one character, hate another. Then one of them says something that doesn’t quite sit right. For a moment, you wonder if you’ve got them all wrong. But you shrug and keep on reading. And then boom: Something you never saw coming, didn’t even have the faintest clue could happen, gets dropped on your head. Your brain is rattling as you flip back through the pages, trying to find what you missed — any little clue you read right through.
And the author doesn’t necessarily have to bury those leads much. In fact, the best psychological thrillers start playing with your head in the first few pages. Sometimes, they give you all the information you need and let you make a complete fool of yourself interpreting it. Other times, they make even the most devious characters seem sympathetic and reasonable. Whatever the case, there’s scarcely a wasted page between their beginnings and their often dreadful conclusions.
1
‘The Collector’ (1963)
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Image via Postscript Books</figure>
John Fowles starts The Collector inside the troubled mind of Frederick Clegg. He’s describing a young woman he’s been watching from his office window, noting her comings and goings in the diary he uses to record his butterfly sightings. He grows increasingly possessive, filling with jealousy when he sees her with another man. Eventually, he becomes resentful, imagining striking her across the face. And he’s still never spoken to her. Just a few pages — and too many leering glances — in, the woman we come to know as Miranda Grey is already his.
And Fowles never lets up. Once Frederick has abducted Miranda and is holding her hostage in a basement, we’re gifted his increasingly twisted reasoning. Miranda is ungrateful; she insults him and refuses to appreciate everything he’s done for her. It’s odd, but it has the effect of making Frederick almost sympathetic at times. It almost makes you want to stop reading as you question your own sanity, which is exactly when Fowles switches to Miranda’s narration. The complaints Clegg described as unreasonable begin to look like desperate attempts to escape. Fowles’ nastiest trick is that Frederick hasn’t exactly lied about what happened, but he’s omitted and distorted just enough to make his version of events sound convincing.
2
‘Rebecca’ (1938)
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Image via William Morrow Paperbacks, 2006</figure>
Rebecca begins in a dream. It’s the narrator, and she’s back at the gates of Manderley, the English country estate she once called home. It looks different, with trees swallowing the driveway. She can barely find the house, but once she does, it’s almost unchanged, with lights and fire on inside. But it’s an illusion; Manderley is a ruin. She wakes hundreds of miles away, deciding not to tell her husband about the dream. Daphne du Maurier has already shown us the aftermath, but she’s in no hurry to explain it.
And that’s how du Maurier gets you: You know disaster awaits Manderley before you’ve even met the people responsible. So when the narrator recalls becoming the second Mrs. de Winter, every moment is tinged with cynicism. Then there’s Rebecca, the dead first wife. Du Maurier doesn’t even give her narrator a first name, while Rebecca practically owns every room in the house. The new Mrs. de Winter spends so much time comparing herself to a woman she’s never met that you begin doing it, too, accepting gossip and secondhand recollections as fact. Du Maurier makes the reader resent a dead woman based almost entirely on another woman’s insecurities. So when the truth about Rebecca is finally revealed, it hits all that much harder.
3
‘In a Lonely Place’ (1947)
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Image via Penguin Random House</figure>
Dixon Steele misses the war. He longs for the nights spent flying, something that gave him a sense of power and freedom he’s yet to find in civilian life. We meet him in In a Lonely Place as he stands on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, enjoying the fog that reminds him of flying through clouds. That’s when a young woman steps off a bus. Dix watches her, following her down the darkened street. She hears his footsteps, so she hurries her pace. He slows down, enjoying her fear. Then headlights interrupt his little game, and he’s furious.
Dorothy B. Hughes has barely introduced the man, and already you want to warn every woman in Los Angeles.
And Hughes makes the situation worse by keeping us inside Dix’s head. He blames women for disappointing him, resents men who have what he wants, and thinks himself cleverer than everyone around him. Then he reconnects with an old military friend, Brub Nicolai, who’s become a detective investigating a string of murders. Dix takes special interest in the case, though Brub’s wife, Sylvia, doesn’t seem to like him. She’s watching him, and he can’t figure out why. That’s the irony Hughes sustains throughout the novel: We know what Dix is thinking, but we’re as ignorant as he is about what the women around him might be planning.
Four criminal masterminds. One of them was always going to be yours.
Here is who comes for you, why they picked you out of everyone available, and what they want from
the encounter.
Your nemesis does not want to beat you. He wants to know you
completely, and he is patient enough to wait for it. The frightening part is how good the
conversation is.
- Lecter is the most dangerous kind of opponent: the one who finds you interesting. He
never raises his voice, because he has never needed to. - You keep a great deal to yourself and you are careful about what you show. That reserve
is exactly the door he would knock on. - The films understood something other thrillers missed. The horror is not the violence.
It is being perfectly understood by the wrong person. - He would be unfailingly polite about all of it. That is the worst part.
Your nemesis is not after money, territory or revenge. He is
after a demonstration, and you are the person he has chosen to prove his point on.
- The Joker only picks opponents who believe in something. Your decency is not a defence
against him. It is the entire reason he showed up. - He has no plan you can predict and nothing you can take away, which removes every tool
you would normally reach for. - His whole argument is that you are one bad day away from being him, and you would spend
the rest of your life proving him wrong. - He would call it a magic trick. You would call it the worst night of your life.
Your nemesis respects you, which sounds flattering until you work
out what it means. He chose you because nobody else was worth his time.
- Moriarty is the original criminal mastermind, the template every later one borrows from:
a mind the equal of the hero’s, pointed the wrong way. - You enjoy being the cleverest person in the room. He is counting on exactly that, and he
has already built the room. - This is the rare nemesis who would be genuinely disappointed if you lost badly. He needs
the game to be worth playing. - It ends the way these things always end. Two people, one problem, and only one way down.
Your nemesis has no personal interest in you whatsoever, and that
is precisely what makes him unsurvivable. You are not a rival. You are a stop on the way.
- Chigurh does not negotiate, gloat or explain. He arrives, he asks one question, and the
answer was decided long before you opened your mouth. - You trust yourself to handle things. He is the one problem in the world that has no
interest in how capable you are. - No Country for Old Men rewrote the screen villain by removing the thing audiences
quietly rely on: the sense that talking might work. - Call it. He will wait.
4
‘One Deadly Summer’ (1977)
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Image via Plume</figure>
Florimond Montecciari, better known as Ping-Pong, begins One Deadly Summer by telling us he said yes to something. To what? He doesn’t say. He does admit to slapping a woman named Elle and beating her on another occasion, though he’s more interested in explaining how often he gives in to her demands. Then he’s off talking about his brother’s obsession with cyclist Eddy Merckx, his father’s attempts to make a living playing a pianola, and just about everything except what he agreed to. Sébastien Japrisot has given us a narrator who can’t seem to keep his thoughts straight, and you’re left wondering how much of this rambling matters.
But Japrisot, after letting Ping-Pong recount his relationship with Elle, gives her a chance to speak. And the woman we’ve come to know through the eyes of a lovestruck fool is more complicated. Other narrators follow, each carrying memories and grievances that alter what we think we know. Japrisot also gives the villagers plenty to gossip about, which makes it seem impossible just how little anyone understands about what’s happening around them. And that seemingly meaningless agreement in the opening? Japrisot circles back to it, only now we understand the terrible circumstances surrounding it.
5
‘The Good Son’ (2016)
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Image via Penguin</figure>
The smell of blood wakes Yu-jin. His first thought isn’t murder; it’s that he’s about to have another epileptic seizure. He’s stopped taking his medication. He knows it’s dangerous, but he likes what happens when he goes without it — his senses sharpen and his mind races, making him feel capable of just about anything. Then he remembers: running through the rain the previous night, a girl carrying an umbrella. But little beyond that. You-Jeong Jeong has us trapped from the beginning by a man who can’t account for his own movements.
And Jeong keeps adding layers: Yu-jin’s mother controlled him, interfered with his swimming career, and treated him like a child. Jeong lets him recount his grievances at length, and you can almost understand why he resented her. But there’s something disturbing about his narration, as he never pretends his memory is reliable, which somehow makes him seem more trustworthy. Jeong has you searching for the truth alongside a man who may be the last person interested in finding it. And as the missing pieces of Yu-jin’s past come together, you begin questioning whether he’s forgotten what happened or simply found a more convenient way to remember it.
6
‘A Judgement in Stone’ (1977)
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Image via Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group</figure>
Ruth Rendell tells you who killed the Coverdale family in the very first sentence of A Judgement in Stone. It was their housekeeper, Eunice Parchman, and she did it because she couldn’t read or write. That’s it. Except Rendell goes further, explaining that the murders earned Eunice nothing, exposed the secret she’d spent her life concealing, and ultimately ruined her own future. She even names the accomplice and tells us the four victims died within 15 minutes on Valentine’s Day. You’re scarcely through the opening pages, and Rendell has apparently given away the entire novel. But you’re hooked on trying to figure out exactly how a woman’s inability to read led to four people being shot dead.
And that’s the question Rendell spends the rest of the book answering. She doesn’t bother dangling clues. No, she makes you scrutinize ordinary interactions, wondering which might help explain the murders. A harmless question becomes an insult in Eunice’s mind — a friendly gesture, an act of condescension. And Rendell lets us see both sides, so the reader is painfully aware of how badly everyone misunderstands one another. But no single incident seems remotely capable of explaining four deaths. That’s what keeps you reading, watching these small resentments accumulate, trying to work out how they could lead to something so appalling.
7
‘The Vanishing’ (1984)
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Image via Bloomsbury Paperbacks</figure>
Rex Hofman and his girlfriend, Saskia, are driving through France when they begin bickering about the fuel gauge. Saskia’s terrified they’ll run out of petrol; it happened once before, and Rex left her alone by the roadside while he went looking for help. The experience brought back a childhood nightmare in which she floated through space and got trapped inside a golden egg, with no hope of escape. Eventually, they stop at a service station, make up, and Saskia goes inside to buy drinks. Rex waits. And waits. When he finally goes looking for her, she’s vanished. Tim Krabbé has turned an ordinary couple’s squabble into a nightmare within the opening pages.
Years pass, and Rex still can’t let Saskia go. He’s moved on romantically, but he continues searching for answers, unable to accept that he may never know what happened. Krabbé eventually introduces Raymond Lemorne, a married schoolteacher who becomes fascinated with a question of his own: Could he commit a terrible crime simply to prove himself capable of it? The novel becomes a collision between two men consumed by the need to know something.
The Vanishing
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Jeff Harriman
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Nancy Travis
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Sandra Bullock
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