What is it about marriages that makes them enduringly fertile material for the thriller treatment? Is it that we’re all incurably curious about the lives of others? Is it the schadenfreude of learning that an outwardly perfect union is anything but? Perhaps it’s the fascinating, unnerving suggestion that there may be secrets — terrible, life-upending secrets — even within the sanctuary of a person’s home and at the heart of this most intimate of relationships.
In any case, this is a subgenre of psychological suspense that has gone on to spawn its own sub-subgenres — the wife/husband “before,” the gaslighting spouse, the couple intent on destroying one another — and it shows no sign of releasing its hold on readers’ imaginations. Here are some of my favorite matrimonial thrills, recent and vintage.
The List
By Yomi Adegoke
“The List” starts with a horrifying premise: what if the man you loved, with whom you were planning to spend the rest of your life, suddenly appeared on a leaked social media list of abusers, forcing you to question everything you thought you knew about him. This is technically a pre-marriage thriller (the protagonists, Ola and Michael, are engaged), but it is nonetheless a fascinating and nuanced exploration of how little it takes to completely upend two lives, and of the gray areas inherent to this sort of online shaming.
Rebecca
By Daphne du Maurier
We’ve all felt it, no? The curiosity about a lover’s previous partners? In the time before social media stalking, one had to get creative to sate one’s unhealthy curiosity: communing with the palpable presence haunting one’s new marital home, interrogating obsessively loyal domestic servants and investigating a dilapidated boathouse full of eerie clues. In this glorious, gothic portrayal of a marriage of unequals, the presence of the first Mrs. de Winter eclipses our protagonist’s sense of self so entirely that we never even learn the narrator’s name. This is the book that spawned an entire subgenre of domestic thrillers about “the one before” (though Charlotte Brontë deserves some of the credit), as well as a clutch of direct “Rebecca” retellings.
Things We Do in the Dark
By Jennifer Hillier
This dark, twisting tale starts with an apparent spousal killing. Paris Peralta is found standing over her famous and much older husband’s body, holding a straight razor: It doesn’t get much more cut-and-dried than that. Except Paris swears she’s innocent. The initial setup unlocks, in classic Hillier fashion, a whole nesting doll sequence of other mysteries and deaths — and a secret history much more complex than a simple (if bloody) case of mariticide.
Wife
By Charlotte Mendelson
Not technically a thriller (though I’m always wary of hard genre definitions), this book certainly has many of the hallmarks of one. There are threatening notes pinned to pets’ litter boxes, a getaway car and an urgently ticking clock as Zoe tries, over the course of a single day, to escape the marriage in which she’s been effectively imprisoned for two decades. Spliced with the claustrophobic contemporary drama are flashbacks to the genesis of Zoe’s relationship with her wife, Penny, at which many red flags were visible but colored perhaps by the very same rose-tinted spectacles that grace the book’s glorious cover. We are privy to the gaslighting and coercion that have been the hallmarks of their marriage and the monstrous control that Penny has exerted over Zoe’s life, co-opting neighbors, family members and even Zoe herself as foot soldiers in her reign of terror. By turns comic, sinister and affecting, this is a brilliant examination of the self-delusion and domestic power play at the heart of a truly dysfunctional union.
Gone Girl
By Gillian Flynn
The OG of marital cautionary tales. That opening paragraph. That midpoint twist. That unforgettable, gut punch ending. As a thriller writer myself I’m both pained and awed by Flynn’s ability to include page upon page of back story and not lose her reader. It works (and how!) because we are just so invested in her characters and their terrible behavior toward one another … and also because she writes like a flipping dream and brings us two brilliantly drawn villains: one hopelessly flawed, the other the perfect psychopath.
The Last Thing He Told Me
By Laura Dave
When Hannah’s beloved, dedicated husband Owen disappears, leaving her a cryptic note, she begins to realize that she may not have known the real man at all. But there’s also a different kind of domestic drama going on here: Hannah’s relationship with her stepdaughter, Bailey, Owen’s child from a previous marriage. It’s in the exploration of the importance of chosen family that Dave’s novel shines (and, of course, in the wonderful twist-upon-twist plot).
Adèle
By Leila Slimani; translated by Sam Taylor
Every morning, after Adèle leaves her husband and infant son behind in their beautiful Parisian apartment, she starts thinking about where she’s going to look for some extramarital sex — the grimier and more debasing, the better. She’s a sex addict, apparently driven by ennui, the lack of intimacy in her own marriage and an instinct to self-destruct. Luis Buñuel’s film “Belle de Jour” lives in the DNA of this book, as does Gustave Flaubert’s classic bad marriage novel “Madame Bovary” (it can’t be coincidental that Adèle’s husband is also a doctor), but it is very much its own beast, examining modern marriage, contemporary French class structures and women’s sexual agency in the post #MeToo era. An uneasy, gripping and often problematic read that has the drive and pace of a thriller, this one will stay with you (even if you don’t entirely want it to) long after reading.
The Marriage Act
By John Marrs
It seems right to include a little speculative fiction here, and few writers do domestic-suspense-meets-dystopia better than Marrs. Set in the same universe as his blockbuster matchmaking nightmare “The One,” “The Marriage Act” takes as its premise the horrifying concept of a far-right-wing government all but mandating marriage, forcing the unwed into effective second-class citizen status. While those in this realm who marry find themselves the beneficiaries of tax breaks, better housing and financial status, they must also submit to supervision of every aspect of their lives — every conversation, every sexual act, every falling out — as the government monitors the state of each union. In our present world, where the “tradwife” movement is on the rise and the surveillance of private citizens in autocratic regimes is reaching unnerving levels of sophistication, this all feels worryingly plausible.
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