A psychological thriller is a suspense story driven by the inner life, mental turmoil, and shifting perceptions of its characters rather than by external physical action Enjoy 10 Chilling Psychological Thrillers to Read!
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10 Chilling Psychological Thrillers to Read
Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
The psychologists would call it folie a deux…
‘Bruno slammed his palms together. ‘Hey! Cheeses, what an idea! I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on a train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch?”
From this moment, almost against his conscious will, Guy Haines is trapped in a nightmare of shared guilt and an insidious merging of personalities.
Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
US Marshal Teddy Daniels has come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to find an escaped murderer named Rachel Solando.
As a killer hurricane bears down on the island, the investigation deepens and the questions mount. How has a barefoot woman escaped from a locked room? Who is leaving them clues in the form of cryptic codes? And what really goes on in Ward C?
The closer Teddy gets to the truth, the more elusive it becomes. And the more he begins to believe that he may never leave Shutter Island. Because someone is trying to drive him insane…
I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid
Jake and his girlfriend are on a drive to visit his parents at their remote farm. After dinner at the family home, things begin to get worryingly strange. And when he leaves her stranded in a snowstorm at an abandoned high school later that night, what follows is a chilling exploration of psychological frailty and the limitations of reality.
Iain Reid’s intense, suspenseful debut novel will have readers’ nerves jangling. A series of tiny clues sprinkled through the relentlessly paced narrative culminate in a haunting twist on the final page.
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides
St Christopher’s College, Cambridge, is a closed world to most.
For Mariana Andros – a group therapist struggling through her private grief – it’s where she met her late husband. For her niece, Zoe, it’s the tragic scene of her best friend’s murder.
As memory and mystery entangle Mariana, she finds a society full of secrets, which has been shocked to its core by the murder of one of its own.
Misery by Stephen King
Misery Chastain is dead. Paul Sheldon has just killed her – with relief, with joy. Misery made him rich; she was the heroine of a string of bestsellers. And now he wants to get on to some real writing.
That’s when the car accident happens, and he wakes up splinted and in pain, in the remote mountain home of his rescuer, Annie Wilkes.
The good news is that Annie was a nurse and has pain-killing drugs. The bad news is that she has long been Paul’s Number One Fan. And when she finds out what Paul has done to Misery, she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like it at all . . .
The Good Son by You-Jeong Jeong
You wake up covered in blood
There’s a body downstairs
Your mother’s body
You didn’t did you?How could you?
You’ve always been the good son
When Yu-jin wakes up covered in blood, and finds the body of his mother downstairs, he decides to hide the evidence and pursue the killer himself.
Then young women start disappearing in his South Korean town. Who is he hunting? And why does the answer take him back to his brother and father who lost their lives many years ago.
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Rachel Watson; drink-addled, unemployed, heartbroken. Her daily, soulless commute from suburbia to Euston only heightens the agony, the journey repetitively taking her past the scene of her old life, a life now occupied by another woman. In her pain, Rachel builds a fantasy, but when that fantasy is shattered by her witness to something no-one should ever see, everything she knows has to change and no longer will she just be The Girl on the Train.
Rebecca By Daphne du Maurier
From the exclusive beaches of Monte Carlo to the verdant grounds of Maxim de Winter’s stately home Manderley, Daphne du Maurier’s gothic classic transports the reader into a social and psychological world of creeping menace and dark desires.
On a trip to the South of France, the shy heroine of Rebecca falls in love with Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower. Although his proposal comes as a surprise, she happily agrees to marry him. But as they arrive at her husband’s home, Manderley, a change comes over Maxim, and the young bride is filled with dread.
The Magus by John Fowles
On a remote Greek Island, Nicholas Urfe finds himself embroiled in the deceptions of a master trickster. As reality and illusion intertwine, Urfe is caught up in the darkest of psychological games. John Fowles expertly unfolds a tale that is lush with over-powering imagery in a spellbinding exploration of human complexities. By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, The Magus is a feast for the mind and the senses.
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
I was like Joan of Arc or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life – the life of a nobody, a waif, invisible. There’s no better way to say it: I was not myself back then. I was somebody else. I was Eileen.
There are a lot of stories about the way people become trapped by their lives, this isn’t one of those; this is something quite different. This is a book about escape.
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