December ScaredyKIT Psychological Thrillers (or catch all)

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December ScaredyKIT Psychological Thrillers (or catch all)

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1Kristelh
Bearbeitet: Nov. 16, 2018, 8:00 pm

December ScaredyKIT Psychological Thrillers (or catch all)



This is our month to read psychological thriller/horror or you can use December to "catch up" before 2018 comes to an end. Psychological horror is a sub genre that uses character's fears, guilt, beliefs, and emotional instability to build tension and further the plot.

Here are some suggestions for psychological thrillers/horror for your consideration.

The Collector by John Fowles
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
Bird Box by Josh Malerman
The Grip of It by Jac Jemc
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Fever Dream by Samanta Schwebin
The Shining by Stephen King

Authors that write psychological thrillers include Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Gillian Flynn, John Connolly,

2mstrust
Nov. 17, 2018, 9:50 am

I'll have to check my shelves, but since I've read most of the books on list of suggestions I'm bound to have more that fit this category.

3whitewavedarling
Nov. 17, 2018, 11:44 am

I'm planning on reading Dark Rooms by Lili Anolik, which I've been meaning to read for ages.

4DeltaQueen50
Nov. 17, 2018, 12:24 pm

I am going to read Eeny Meeny by M. J. Arlidge for this theme.

5Kristelh
Bearbeitet: Nov. 17, 2018, 3:14 pm

I just finished Ill Will which would work for this theme, too.

6lkernagh
Nov. 17, 2018, 6:07 pm

I see that Tana French's The Likeness has been tagged as a psychological thriller a number of times here on LT so I will try to get around to reading it in December.

7LibraryCin
Nov. 17, 2018, 10:01 pm

I have a few options for this one:

Watching Edie / Camilla Way (also fits both AlphaKIT letters, so this one is the front runner)
The Empty Chair / Jeffrey Deaver
Dance of Death / Douglas Preston
We Were Liars / E. Lockhart

8sturlington
Nov. 29, 2018, 8:25 am

Looking back at my November reads, I read quite a few psychological thrillers (but not a serial killer among them). In order of preference, I read The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay, The Marsh King's Daughter by Karen Dionne, and The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn.

I'm not sure if I'll get to more this month. I may use the month instead to catch up on apocalyptic reads, although it's possible that some of those might qualify.

9Kristelh
Bearbeitet: Dez. 2, 2018, 6:08 pm

I finished The Alienist by Caleb Carr. Great book. Early history of forensics and hunting a serial killer.

10sturlington
Dez. 16, 2018, 9:43 am

For this month, I read The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood. This was a harrowing survival story about ten girls who are drugged and taken to an abandoned sheep farm in the Australian Outback, where they are kept imprisoned by an immense electrified fence circling the compound. The girls' only commonality is that they were all involved in public sex scandals. Their captor is an impersonal corporation, which has imprisoned them for unspecified reasons, and their guards turn out to be as much prisoners as they are when the power is turned off and the food stores start to run out. The ordeal takes a different psychological toll on each character, with some breaking down and others learning how to survive off the land they are stranded in. This was often a difficult read, but also sometimes quite beautiful in its description of the landscape and the animals living it, and the transformation of the two main characters as they rejected the misogynist narrative that had landed them in this place and reverted to their more essential selves was very compelling. I did want to know more about the why of the girls' imprisonment, what the company's reason was for punishing these particular women, and how this was perceived in the outside world. Still, by keeping the focus narrow and keeping the reader in the dark as much as the characters are, we feel like we are imprisoned as well.

11LibraryCin
Dez. 17, 2018, 11:04 pm

Watching Edie / Camilla Way
4 stars

Heather and Edie were friends when they were 16, but there was some kind of falling out. They are now in their 30s. Edie long-since moved away and is now pregnant and on her own. After Edie has her baby, she is unable to function, and Heather shows up to take care of them. But once Edie comes to her senses, she can’t get past what happened when they were younger and asks Heather to leave. But Heather doesn’t want to go…

The story is told in alternating chapters between Edie in her 30s and Heather at 16, so the reader hears the story from both characters’ perspectives and as things happen at each age. I thought this was very suspenseful; it kept me wanting to read to find out what had happened when they were 16, plus what was going on in “current” day and how things were going to turn out. I did prefer Edie’s viewpoint, but I think it really made a difference for the suspense to get into Heather’s head, as well. I was almost going to “up” my rating just a touch near the end, but the end, itself, was a little too open-ended for me. Some things were tied up, but not everything.

12LibraryCin
Dez. 17, 2018, 11:04 pm

Looking at my list above, I did read "We Were Liars", but decided it didn't really fit here (in my opinion). I'm almost done listening to "The Empty Chair" and won't likely be posting it here, either.

13staci426
Dez. 18, 2018, 9:08 am

I read All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage. It started off promising, opening with the murder of a young wife and mother in her fairly new home in late 1970s upstate NY. Then it flashes back to the time leading up to the murder. I didn't really care for it, I especially did not like the ending.

I did an end of the year catch up with a reread of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I didn't really remember anything about this from the first time I read it back in 2011, and wanted a refresher before watching the new Netflix show. I enjoyed it much more this second time around.

14Kristelh
Dez. 19, 2018, 9:21 pm

finished The Woman In the Window by A. J. Finn. It was okay, but you could see the twist coming so not much of a surprise.

15sturlington
Dez. 20, 2018, 8:55 am

>14 Kristelh: I agree with you on that one.

16sturlington
Dez. 26, 2018, 7:35 am

I finished another one, short and easily readable in one or two days: Foe by Iain Reid

Foe has a claustrophobic setting, an old farmhouse out in the middle of unending canola fields, and it has only three primary characters: Junior, the narrator; his wife, Hen; and a visitor, Terrance. Terrance shows up unexpectedly to tell Junior that he has been chosen by lottery for the long list of people who might go live on a space station for a couple of years, leaving his wife behind. This visit reveals some tensions in the marriage, at least on Hen's part, and this largely is what the novel is about: marriage, our expectations of and assumptions about each other as married people, our needs for ourselves to live fulfilling lives. The suspense is a slow burn, gradually thickening, until Terrance returns. There are twists, but they aren't the point of the novel either. This domestic tale with a sci-fi context feels nail-bitingly creepy. Slight spoiler: I also appreciate that this author played around with punctuation use for a reason, rather than just because it's trendy (or lazy) not to use quotation marks these days, and used it to very good effect.

17whitewavedarling
Dez. 29, 2018, 7:33 pm

Just posted a rant--er, cough, review--on Dark Rooms by Lili Anolik. I cannot recommend it, and will definitely avoid the author in the future.