Psychological thriller books, sorted by mechanism
Psychological thriller novels for adults are best sorted by what they do to the reader, not by how they feel, and there are 5 mechanisms that account for nearly all of them: the unreliable narrator, the sealed point of view, the delayed reframe, the unresolved ambiguity and the speculative premise attached to a damaged mind. A list arranged by mood tells you which books are tense. A list arranged by mechanism tells you which book to read next, and it also predicts, with some accuracy, whether the film made from it will be any good.
Books built on an unreliable narrator
Books built on an unreliable narrator hand the reader a voice with a motive to distort, and then let the distortion do the frightening. The reader is not solving a crime, the reader is calibrating a witness.
- The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, Liz Jensen, 2004. Alternates a comatose 9 year old with the doctor treating him, so the reader holds 2 accounts that cannot both be complete.
- War Crimes for the Home, Liz Jensen, 2002. An elderly woman reconstructs wartime Bristol through a memory that has been protecting her for 50 years.
- Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn, 2012. A pair of narrators, one of whom is writing for an audience.
- The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins, 2015. A narrator whose blackouts remove the evidence she most needs.
- American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis, 1991. A narrator whose account may be fantasy and who is never corrected.
Unreliable narrators are the reason the genre exists as something separate from crime, and they are also the single hardest element to move onto film. A camera can film a liar. It cannot film a lie being told to you directly.
Books built on a sealed point of view
Books built on a sealed point of view give the reader complete access to one mind and none whatsoever to the mind that matters. The narrator here is usually honest. The terror is that nobody else's calculations are visible.
- The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith, 1955. The reader is locked inside Ripley and must guess, alongside him, what everyone else suspects.
- Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier, 1938. An unnamed narrator surrounded by people who all knew the dead woman she is being measured against.
- The Collector, John Fowles, 1963. A pair of long accounts of the same captivity, placed side by side and left to indict each other.
- Room, Emma Donoghue, 2010. A 5 year old narrates a situation whose horror he does not have the vocabulary to name.
Donoghue's book is the useful case for anyone coming to this from a film, because it demonstrates that the sealed child's-eye view can survive adaptation if the film is willing to build its whole grammar around it.
Books built on a delayed reframe
Books built on a delayed reframe spend 200 pages establishing a reading and then invalidate it in one disclosure. The mechanism is the most commercially successful and the least re-readable.
- Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane, 2003. An island, an investigation, and a last chapter that reassigns every scene.
- Before I Go to Sleep, S. J. Watson, 2011. A narrator whose memory resets daily, which allows the reframe to be delivered in instalments.
- Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk, 1996. Structurally a psychological thriller, whatever else it is.
Books built on ambiguity the author refuses to settle
Books built on ambiguity the author refuses to settle offer 2 readings, supernatural and psychological, and decline to confirm either. They are the classic end of the genre and the least commercial.
- The Turn of the Screw, Henry James, 1898. The origin text for the argument, and still unsettled after more than 120 years.
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson, 1962. A household narrated by someone whose account is charming and completely closed.
- The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters, 2009. A haunting and a class grievance offered as the same phenomenon.
The science-fiction branch does the same thing to a bigger question
The science-fiction branch of the psychological thriller keeps the damaged narrator and points the doubt at personhood rather than at a crime. The list runs to 4 essential titles: Solaris by Stanisław Lem (1961), where a psychologist is confronted with a person assembled from his own memory; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968); A Scanner Darkly by the same author (1977), in which the narrator is his own surveillance target; and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005), narrated in a voice so composed that the reader has to supply the horror themselves.
Which of these actually became films, and how far the films travelled
Most of the books above have been filmed, and the distance each film travelled from its novel is not random: it tracks the mechanism. Sealed point of view and delayed reframe cross reasonably well. Unreliable narration and unresolved ambiguity do not.
| Work | Book | Film | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rebecca | 1938 | 1940 | |
| The Talented Mr Ripley | 1955 | 1960, 1999 | |
| The Collector | 1963 | 1965 | |
| Shutter Island | 2003 | 2010 | |
| The Ninth Life of Louis Drax | 2004 | 2016 | |
| Never Let Me Go | 2005 | 2010 | |
| Room | 2010 | 2015 | |
| Gone Girl | 2012 | 2014 | |
| The Girl on the Train | 2015 | 2016 |
Emma Donoghue's Room (2010) is narrated throughout by a 5 year old, so every object and every adult reaches the reader already translated into his vocabulary.
The 2015 film, scripted by Donoghue herself, rebuilt the camera height, the framing and the sound design around the same eye line rather than converting the book to an adult point of view.
Read 2 entries on that table against each other. Room and The Ninth Life of Louis Drax are both narrated by a child in an impossible situation, and both were adapted within a decade. Donoghue wrote her own screenplay and the film committed to the boy. The Jensen adaptation kept the boy's voice but moved its centre of gravity to the adult who could walk around, and the difference in distance travelled is visible in the bar.
Where to start if you have never read one
Start with a short single-voice novel rather than a multi-narrator one, because the mechanism is easier to see when there is only one of it. Rebecca and The Talented Mr Ripley are the two most instructive first books in the genre: each runs on a single voice, both have been filmed more than once, and in both cases the films are available and worth watching afterwards to see what a camera keeps and what it drops.