9 Dark Psychological Thriller Books Where Nobody Is Okay

Did you know there are three kinds of horror fans, and one kind reads scary stories to cope? According to Aarhus University, in a 2023 study in the Journal of Media Psychology, researchers asked American horror fans why they like horror and sorted them into Adrenaline Junkies, White Knucklers and Dark Copers, then found the same three types again among Danish visitors to a haunted house. The Adrenaline Junkies reported immediate enjoyment, the White Knucklers reported personal growth, and the Dark Copers reported both. I am DEFINITELY a Dark Coper.

For me the dark part is a woman going quiet. Here is how I put it in my memoir Where to Nest, on a trip to Japan with an old flame:

My own insecurities around him—feeling less attractive, wealthy, and articulate, and that being a good “housewife” meant “only speak when spoken to”—had led to me not feeling comfortable speaking up. I grew up where part of the film Stepford Wives was filmed, a movie based on a satirical book where the husbands replace their strong, independent, smart housewives with more subservient, “perfect” robots. I was also trying to enjoy this trip, which meant doing things differently than he wanted me to. I felt like I was free-falling into my old life.

Where to Nest, Chapter 14

The lesson I keep relearning is that the scariest person in the story is usually someone you trust, and sometimes it’s the voice in your own head telling you to stay quiet. That’s why I turn to dark psychological thrillers: they show me how easily it happens to the rest of us, too. Here are the dark psychological thriller books that will make you question who you can trust:

The Short Version

• If you want one you can finish tonight, read Perfect Modern Wife by Kristen Van Nest: a wellness retreat run by an estranged friend who became a famous tradwife influencer.
• If you want the reporter who carves words into her own skin, read Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn.
• If you want the nanny novel that won the Prix Goncourt, read The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani.
• If you want the killer’s last twelve hours told from the women he left behind, read Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka.

How I Picked These Books

I grew up in the town where part of The Stepford Wives was filmed, and now I write psychological thrillers myself. My criteria for this include:

1. You can’t trust the narrator: The person telling you the story is hiding something from you, or from herself, and you only find out when it’s too late to brace. The person who gets you is somebody you’d already decided to like, which makes it SO much creepier.
2. The damage is already done: These aren’t books where you wait for the bad thing to happen. The bad thing is in the premise, and the rest of the book is the why.
3. There’s no happy ending: The last chapter doesn’t give you the relief you were waiting for. So pick your night carefully, because you’ll still be thinking about it at breakfast!

At a Glance

What Are the Best Dark Psychological Thriller Books?

I picked nine, one per author, and put them in the order I’d hand them to a friend who asked for dark thriller novels with no comfort in them.

1. Perfect Modern Wife by Kristen Van Nest (2025)

Read this if: you have one evening and you want to be uneasy from the first page, before anything has technically happened.

What you’re getting: a short story you can finish in one sitting, set at a wellness retreat. Audrey is a successful executive who has watched her estranged friend McKinley become one of the most famous tradwife influencers around: the wild friend who used to drink way too much tequila is now the face of a movement where women make food from scratch for their children and preach about how much they love being subservient to their husbands. When their mutual friend Jessica signs up for McKinley’s Perfect Modern Wife bootcamp, Jessica disappears, and Audrey goes to the retreat to find out what happened to her.

Why dark-thriller fans will like it: Audrey expects organic smoothies and sunset selfies. Instead, she finds McKinley crawling across the kitchen floor at 3 AM, hands raw and bleeding, chanting about being the “perfect modern wife.” Perfect Modern Wife is part Stepford Wives, part Midsommar, and now optioned to become a movie.

What readers say:

“This one was a fast, unsettling read, and I loved every second of it. Dark, sharp, and just the right amount of unhinged.” — –Keres–, Goodreads Reviewer

“This one didn’t disappoint. It’s dark, unhinged and I was here for it.” — Laura Smith, Goodreads Reviewer

“This story was completely unhinged and creepier than I could have imagined!” — Pav S., Goodreads Reviewer

I’m giving it away free while the promo’s live.

Read Free For a Limited Time →

2. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (2006)

Read this if: you left your hometown on purpose.

What you’re getting: It’s Gillian Flynn’s first novel, published by Shaye Areheart Books in 2006. Camille Preaker is a Chicago reporter, once institutionalized as a teenager, who is sent back to her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri, to cover a murder and a disappearance, and Sharp Objects is about what the town and her mother do to her once she’s there. HBO turned it into an eight-episode limited series starring Amy Adams in July 2018.

Why dark-thriller fans will like it: Kirkus called it “a savage debut thriller that renders the Electra complex electric, the mother/daughter bond a psychopathic stranglehold,” and summed it up as “Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.” A psychopathic stranglehold, in a trade review! Publishers Weekly said Flynn gives new meaning to the term dysfunctional family, which is putting it nicely for what Camille’s mother does to her. If you want more after it, I keep a list of books like Sharp Objects.

Fair warning: Camille is a cutter with words carved into her skin, and a young girl is murdered and mutilated.

Read Now →

3. Verity by Colleen Hoover (2018)

Read this if: you want the one your group chat has already fought about.

What you’re getting: Verity is Colleen Hoover’s first thriller. She published it herself in December 2018 and it had sold almost 900,000 copies by the time Grand Central bought it in 2021. Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin, is hired by Jeremy Crawford to finish his injured wife Verity’s series, and in the Crawford house she finds an autobiography Verity never meant anyone to read, including an account of the night her family changed forever.

Why dark-thriller fans will like it: Verity sold more than one million copies in 2023 alone (a million, in one year, for a book from 2018?!). It’s now a movie starring Anne Hathaway. I have a whole list of books like Verity if this is the one that gets you.

Fair warning: Common Sense Media calls it “an erotic thriller for adults,” and flags sex, violence and a child’s death.

Read Now →

4. Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka (2022)

Read this if: you’re done with serial killer books that are about the serial killer.

What you’re getting: Notes on an Execution opens on death row in a Texas prison, where Ansel Packer is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in twelve hours. His chapters are told in second-person present tense, and flashbacks that start at his birth in 1973 alternate with the points of view of his mother, his ex-wife’s twin sister and a New York State police investigator. William Morrow published it in January 2022.

Why dark-thriller fans will like it: the publisher’s tagline is “Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. But this is not his story. This is the story of the women who survive.” So by the third sentence of the tagline, the serial killer is already a side character. Mystery Writers of America gave it the Edgar Award for Best Novel in April 2023, and Publishers Weekly called it “this masterly thriller.”

Fair warning: Packer grew up with an abusive father and began killing animals at age three, and by the end you see exactly what his killings cost the women left behind.

Read Now →

5. The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani (2018)

Read this if: you want the why, because the who is in the first sentence.

What you’re getting: The Perfect Nanny opens with the murders of two children in a nanny’s care, and most of the story is told in flashback, working back to how it happened. The first line is “The baby is dead.” Myriam decides to go back to work as a lawyer after having children, and she and her husband find Louise, a quiet, polite, devoted woman who sings to the children and cleans the family’s chic Paris apartment. Sam Taylor translated it from the French, and Penguin published it in 2018.

Why dark-thriller fans will like it: It won the Prix Goncourt on November 3, 2016, with six votes on the first ballot (for a THRILLER!), and Slimani was the first Moroccan woman to win it. The New York Times Book Review called it “Mesmerizingly twisted” and put it on its 10 Best Books of 2018.

Fair warning: it was inspired by the 2012 case of a New York nanny who killed two of the children in her care.

Read Now →

6. Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (2015)

Read this if: you want a narrator who tells you up front that she was someone else back then.

What you’re getting: An older Eileen narrates Eileen in first person, looking back fifty years at December 1964 in a wintry New England town she calls X-ville. She is trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s carer in his squalid home and her job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, until the charismatic Rebecca Saint John arrives as the new counsellor. Penguin Press published it in 2015.

Why dark-thriller fans will like it: Kirkus, in a starred review, called it “a shadowy and superbly told story of how inner turmoil morphs into outer chaos.” It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016 and won the PEN/Hemingway Award the same year. NPR called it “Charmingly disturbing. Delightfully dour. Pleasingly perverse.” Pleasingly perverse is the one I’d put on the cover.

Fair warning: it’s a macabre read that is, at times, unbearably tense, and it deals with child abuse, alcoholism and violence.

Read Now →

7. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (2003)

Read this if: you want the mother’s side, in her own letters.

What you’re getting: We Need to Talk About Kevin is told as a series of letters from Eva to her apparently estranged husband Franklin, written after their son Kevin kills seven of his schoolmates, a cafeteria worker and a teacher at his upstate New York high school. Counterpoint, 2003.

Why dark-thriller fans will like it: Publishers Weekly called it “a harrowing, psychologically astute, sometimes even darkly humorous novel.” (Darkly humorous, about a school shooting?!) It won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005. Eva was uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, which makes her letters even harder to read.

Fair warning: Kirkus warns: “Not for the faint-hearted or those contemplating parenthood.”

Read Now →

8. My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell (2020)

Read this if: you want a narrator who argues with herself about whether it was abuse, on every page.

What you’re getting: My Dark Vanessa alternates between past and present: in 2000, Vanessa Wye is a lonely sophomore at Maine’s Browick boarding school when her 42-year-old English teacher, Jacob Strane, begins to pay attention to her, and seventeen years later she is still deciding what to call it. William Morrow published it in 2020, and Russell is originally from eastern Maine, the same state as Browick.

Why dark-thriller fans will like it: Publishers Weekly called it “a frighteningly sharp debut” and “a damning indictment of sexual predation.” NPR called it “a page-turner structured to amp up suspense,” and yes, that is a strange thing to say about this subject. It was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2021.

Fair warning: NPR warned that “It features a lot of graphic sex, pretty much all of which is distasteful,” and the relationship is between a fifteen-year-old and her teacher.

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9. Boy Parts by Eliza Clark (2020)

Read this if: you want the female gaze with a camera and a bad intention.

What you’re getting: In Boy Parts, Irina has been exiled from the art world, is on sabbatical from her dead-end bar job, and has moved out of London into a flat in Newcastle. She obsessively takes explicit photographs of the average-looking men she persuades to model for her, and then an invitation from a fashionable London gallery sends her into a self-destructive tailspin centered on her best friend and a shy young man from her local supermarket. It came out in the UK in 2020 and from Harper Perennial in the US in 2023.

Why dark-thriller fans will like it: the Guardian said it “will make most readers howl with laughter and/or shut their eyes in horror,” and the Irish Times called it “A dazzling, horrifying debut.” Boy Parts was Blackwell’s Fiction Book of the Year in 2020, and Soho Theatre staged it in 2023 as a one-woman show with Aimée Kelly as Irina.

Fair warning: Irina photographs young men in vulnerable positions, and one of them appears to sexually assault her.

Read Now →

Which Dark Thriller Books Should You Read Tonight?

I sorted the dark thriller books here by what kind of night you’re having:

• You have one evening and a friend who stopped answering texts: Perfect Modern Wife, the only one here where the whole thing happens inside a wellness retreat.
• You want to not sleep: The Perfect Nanny, which I’d keep away from any new parent in your life.
• You want to laugh and feel bad about it: Boy Parts.

If none of those three is the mood, try my lists of psychological thrillers by women, gaslighting thriller books and unreliable narrator books.

FAQ: Dark Psychological Thriller Books

What Are Dark Psychological Thriller Books?

In dark psychological thriller books, the danger comes from someone the narrator already trusts, and the author never makes it better by the end. The two children in The Perfect Nanny are already dead when the book opens, and the nanny was the person their parents trusted with them. In Boy Parts, the narrator is the danger: Irina is the one taking the explicit photographs.

What Are the Best Dark Thriller Books Right Now?

The best dark thriller books right now are Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka, Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh and The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani. Kukafka’s book won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 2023.

What Makes a Thriller a Dark Thriller Novel Instead of a Regular One?

In My Dark Vanessa, the predator is the narrator’s own English teacher, and seventeen years later Vanessa is still deciding what to call what he did. And by the time Eva starts writing letters to her absent husband in We Need to Talk About Kevin, the shooting is already two years in the past.

Which Dark Psychological Thrillers on This List Have Been Adapted?

Five of the nine have been filmed, including The Perfect Nanny, which became the 2019 French film Chanson douce starring Karin Viard. HBO made Sharp Objects a limited series in 2018, created by Marti Noxon and starring Amy Adams, with Jean-Marc Vallée directing every episode. Eileen became a 2023 film from director William Oldroyd, We Need to Talk About Kevin a film that Lynne Ramsay co-wrote and directed with Tilda Swinton playing the mother, and Michael Showalter directed the Verity movie. Boy Parts went to the stage instead, at Soho Theatre in 2023.

What Are the Most Disturbing Thriller Books on This List?

The most disturbing thriller books here are My Dark Vanessa and The Perfect Nanny. Russell makes My Dark Vanessa the harder one by keeping Vanessa unsure, as an adult, what to call what happened to her, and Publishers Weekly said the abuse robbed Vanessa not only of her childhood but also of her own once-promising future. Kirkus said the motive in The Perfect Nanny remains unfathomable, rendering it all the more frightening.

What Are Good Twisted Thriller Books for Fans of Gone Girl?

For twisted thriller books after Gone Girl, start with Flynn’s own Sharp Objects, then Verity. I keep a full list of books like Gone Girl for when you finish those two.

Which Book on This List Is Both a Dark Psychological Thriller and a Satire?

Perfect Modern Wife by Kristen Van Nest is both. It’s a cult psychological thriller about a wellness retreat run by a tradwife influencer, where Audrey’s friend Jessica disappears into the bootcamp. If you want to laugh at the people doing the controlling, it’s the better pick over Verity or The Perfect Nanny, which never let you laugh at all. As Goodreads reviewer Erika put it: “I cheered for the women, side-eyed the men, and laughed at the satire threaded through the horror.”

Which Dark Fiction Books Here Should You Read First?

Of the dark fiction books on this list, start with Eileen, where, as Kirkus noted, Eileen describes her own contemplation of suicide with a casual, implacable cool, then Notes on an Execution, which the New York Times named its Best Crime Novel of the Year. Save My Dark Vanessa for a week when you can take it.

Updated November 2026

Some links in this post are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a small commission if you buy through them — at no extra cost to you.

Disclosure: Kristen Van Nest, who writes this blog, is the author of The Storm Reaper, Perfect Modern Wife and Where to Nest.