Creepy, Tense Thrillers You'll Love
It's spooky season! WSIR #48
I’m not sure when houses started being decorated for Halloween but I am 1000% HERE. FOR. IT. I think all houses should be as festive as possible, for as long as possible; I would keep my holiday lights up all year if I could (not that I know who, exactly, is stopping me.) But anyway - if the eight foot fuzzy spider climbing the wall of the house down the block has anything to say about it, it’s officially spooky season!
Personally, Halloween’s not my holiday. I don’t actually like to be scared by my consumed culture, and I don’t like gratuitous gore. You will never and I mean NEVER find me watching Halloween horror movies. But every so often I do love to read a tense thriller that makes me double-check the door locks - particularly if the book’s impact is less violent and more psychologically taut.
The following books do all circle around deaths (um, spoiler alert?) but what ties them together is that impending, suffocating, creepy dread that keeps you flying through the pages (and I’ve included one I sadly just can’t recommend). Enjoy … if you dare! (insert spine-chilling cackle, am I doing Halloween right?)
Is there anyone who creates better fictional dread than Megan Abbott? Is there anyone who can make sexual desire seem more viscerally repellent, dangerous and unsettling than Megan Abbott? If there is, I truly don’t want to read it. And I mean all of this in the best way.
The Turnout is about two sisters who own a ballet school, and what happens when a suspicious accident - and an even more menacing stranger - appears in the midst of The Nutcracker season. Like all of Abbott’s books, this is less about the actual setting and mechanics of ballet and more about high-wire, full-bodied, pressure-cooker environments where women behave in alarming ways to pursue their ambition. Shivery, stifling and skin-crawling!
I love Megan Abbott so much - here’s another gem from the archive.
Very early on in For Your Own Good, you know who the murderer is. But will they be caught? Will there be consequences? Will “good” actually prevail and what is that, even? I had fun with this novel, set in a high-pressure private high school, elevating past the typical summer thriller standard with judiciously-used wry wit and a cast of characters where everyone is just a little more interesting and a little less likable than you expect.
I’d put Tana French’s Dublin Murder Series up there with any detective series out there (see why), but The Witch Elm - a standalone thriller - is almost as good (and many readers I know think it’s better - you be the judge.)
Main character Toby comes to live with his aging Uncle Hugo in the grand old family house where Toby and his cousins spent much of their childhood —Toby recovering from an assault and Hugo succumbing to brain cancer. When a discovery is made on the property, everyone is forced to reconcile what they thought they knew about the past. Although the book starts slowly slowly, with every page the air in the house (and the book) feels thicker, heavier, eerier. What I loved about this, beyond French’s excellent, almost literary writing and atmospheric vibe, is the unreliability of virtually every narrator, keeping everything off-kilter like a Twilight Zone episode, inevitably drawing toward irrevocable revelations. Fine, Tana French, YOU ARE EXCELLENT.
You can skip …
While The Silent Patient by this author wasn’t perfect, it was twisty and unusual enough that I liked it. The Maidens, Michaelides's follow-up, didn’t hit that mark for me. The first part of the book, sparked by the murder of a young woman and set in Cambridge University with all its attending collegiate-and-classics appeal, had a lot of promise, but to me the dialogue was clunky and the ending was undeserved and unresolved. I was looking forward to this one but unfortunately, I think it’s a skipper. (Also the Instagram family agrees and how could the Internet possibly lie to us?)
Second Serving: Anxious People
We talked about Anxious People back in the “Three Delightful Reads” edition but when the great Joanna M. told me she had finished and loved this book, I felt compelled to re-surface it for anyone who missed it the first time. Covering a hostage situation in an apartment viewing on New Year’s Eve, and the aftermath (in a fun, madcap kind of way), this is a charming, hilarious, heartfelt and deeply moving little gem of a book about how all of us are really just trying our best for ourselves, the people we love, and the unlikely strangers who move in and out of our lives. Be kind to yourself and read it!
And in closing …
If it’s Halloween, that means the holidays are soon, and if you’re planning to gift books this year, please buy early and independent! It helps indie bookstores and will save you from the supply chain shortages.
Conveniently, every book here links to Bookshop.org, which supports indie bookstores. I even bought myself the rare hardback treat from Bookshop.org with my copy of The Turnout. You can find all my past recos here (or in the archive if you’re craving more book commentary and parenthetical phrasing!)
Love these suggestions? Hate these books? Disagree with me about The Maidens? Want recommendations for another type of book? Please reply to this email or leave me a comment - I would love to know what you’re reading!
I LOVE your descriptions of these books. Almost as good as reading them!