Books Like Gone Girl: 16 Twisty Psychological Thrillers With Narrators You Can’t Trust

That was fourteen years ago, which is upsetting for unrelated reasons, and I’ve spent a good chunk of the time since reading everything publishers shoved at us with “the next Gone Girl” stamped somewhere on the jacket. I want to be clear about the scale of this. Dozens of books with “Girl” in the title, most of them about grown women. Dozens of wine-soaked narrators with conveniently foggy memories. An entire decade of covers featuring a blurry woman staring out a rain-streaked window, as if that were a personality.

Most of those books failed, and they failed the same way: they copied the twist and skipped the voice. Gone Girl doesn’t work because of what happens at the midpoint. Plenty of books have a big midpoint reversal and land with a thud. It works because Gillian Flynn writes rage the way other novelists write weather, ambient and everywhere, and because she understood that a marriage is two people narrating the same events as competing alibis. The cool girl monologue got quoted to death, but the reason it got quoted to death is that it was true and mean and nobody had said it in a thriller before.

Here’s my confession, since we’re doing this: I kept reading the knockoffs on purpose. Long past the point of reasonable hope. Some part of me was chasing that beach-house feeling, the one where a book you thought you had figured out reaches up and slaps you. It’s a cheap high and I don’t care. I have read the bad ones, the mid ones, the ones that made me want to write apology letters to my own bookshelves, and I found the handful that actually deliver.

So this list is not “thrillers that sold well after 2012.” It’s books that share the actual DNA: a narrator you can’t trust, told with enough intimacy that the lying feels personal, and preferably some genuine nastiness underneath. I’ve read every book on this page, including the ones I’m about to be rude about. Especially those.

What “like Gone Girl” actually means

People say psychological thriller and mean about nine different things, so let’s be precise. The Gone Girl machine has two parts. First, an unreliable narrator: not a narrator who’s occasionally wrong, but one whose telling of the story is itself the crime scene. Second, intimacy. These books happen in marriages, friendships, families, the places where you’re supposed to be safe, which is exactly why they’re worse than any serial-killer-in-the-woods novel. Nobody in your house needs a knife. They know where you keep your shame.

The feeling of reading one, when it’s done right, is low-grade paranoia. You start auditing sentences. You notice a narrator described a Tuesday in suspicious detail and skipped a whole weekend. You flip back forty pages to reread a scene because you suddenly don’t believe it happened the way you were told, and here’s the thing, that flip-back is the whole art form. The author made you a detective and a mark at the same time.

None of this started in 2012, by the way. Daphne du Maurier was doing it in 1938. Patricia Highsmith built her entire career on making you root for someone you’d cross the street to avoid. Flynn’s real innovation was voltage: she took a literary device that had been living politely in book-club fiction and wired it to pure spite. The books below run on that same current. Body count is irrelevant. Some of the scariest ones have no murders at all.

The ones worth the hype

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn

The correct next book is by Flynn herself, and it’s not Dark Places, it’s this one, her debut, which is meaner and sadder than Gone Girl and I will argue better-written. Camille Preaker, a barely functional reporter, goes home to Wind Gap, Missouri to cover the murders of two girls, and has to stay in her mother’s house to do it. The unreliability here isn’t a trick, it’s damage: Camille has words scarred into her skin, and the prose reads like it was written the same way. It’s slower than Gone Girl, less plot machinery, more rot, and it has the best final-page reveal Flynn ever wrote. Nobody talks about that because the HBO series (great, Amy Adams deserved everything) let people skip the book. Don’t skip the book.

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

Swanson took the bones of Strangers on a Train and made them considerably nastier. A man in an airport bar tells a beautiful stranger his wife is cheating; she suggests, calmly, that maybe the wife should die. The point-of-view switches in this book operate like trapdoors, and there is a chapter break near the middle that made me put the book face-down on a bus seat and stare out the window like a Victorian widow. Lily, the stranger, is the closest thing to Amy Dunne anyone has managed: not a copy, a cousin.

You by Caroline Kepnes

Second person, narrated from inside a stalker’s skull, and the ugly part is that Joe is funny. Genuinely funny, well-read, right about a lot of things, which is how Kepnes makes you complicit one sentence at a time. You catch yourself nodding along with a man hiding someone’s phone and have to sit with what that says about you. The Netflix show sanded him into a smirking antihero; book Joe is both worse and better. Honest note: the sequels thin out fast. The first one is the event.

Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller

Possibly the best unreliable narrator of this century, and she never touches a weapon. Barbara Covett, a lonely aging teacher, befriends a younger colleague who’s having an affair with a student, and narrates the whole disaster in a diary that is, you slowly realize, the record of a hostage-taking. Every generous act has a hook in it. It got a Booker shortlist and the Judi Dench film, and it’s still underread by thriller people because it got shelved as literary fiction. It’s scarier than almost anything with a body in it.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The grandmother of the entire genre. 1938. An unnamed narrator marries a widower and moves into a house that is still, in every meaningful way, occupied by his dead first wife. I read it at nineteen expecting a gothic romance and instead got gaslit by an entire novel, which is the correct experience. Every domestic thriller with a suspicious husband, a housekeeper who hates you, and a truth buried in a marriage is photocopying this book. Fair warning: the middle drags the way old books drag. The last third pays for everything.

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Highsmith invented the machine where you spend three hundred pages rooting for a murderer and then audit your own soul at 2 a.m. Tom Ripley wants Dickie Greenleaf’s life, his money, his ease, his Italy, and takes it. Not a twist book. A complicity book, which is the truer Gone Girl DNA anyway. If you only know the movie, the novel is colder and funnier and Tom gets away with more, in every sense.

Deep cuts your algorithm isn’t showing you

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

My used copy of Fingersmith has a previous owner’s pencil in the margin at the end of part one. It says, in full, “WHAT.” That reader and I are family now. Victorian London, a pickpocket raised among thieves gets recruited to help swindle a sheltered heiress out of her fortune, and then the book detonates itself and hands the narration to the woman you thought you understood. If you believe you can’t be genuinely surprised by a novel anymore, this is my prescription. Park Chan-wook turned it into The Handmaiden, which is gorgeous, but the book’s version of the flip hits harder because you did the trusting yourself, in prose, alone.

The Dinner by Herman Koch

Dutch, translated, deceptively simple: two couples meet at a fancy restaurant to discuss something their sons have done, and the courses arrive as chapters while the truth arrives sideways. The narrator starts out charming and wry, the guy you’d want at your table, and Koch curdles him a degree at a time until you understand that the person telling you this story is the thing to be afraid of. People call it unpleasant like that’s a flaw. It’s the point.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

A character study wearing a crime novel’s coat, or maybe the reverse. 1960s Massachusetts, a young woman working at a boys’ prison, living with her drunk father, describing her own repulsive habits with total serenity, until a glamorous new coworker arrives and the last stretch turns into an actual crime story. Moshfegh has said she started it partly as an exercise in writing something commercial; it came out feral anyway. Not for everyone. Very much for me.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid

Dread, distilled. A woman on a road trip to meet her boyfriend’s parents, something wrong on every page that you cannot quite name. It’s short enough to read in a night and I recommend doing exactly that, because the accumulating wrongness works best without breaks. The ending is divisive, half the internet wants a refund, and I think the refund people are wrong. Read it before you watch the Kaufman film, which makes different choices with the same nightmare.

Social Creature by Tara Isabella Burton

Ripley with an iPhone. Two young women in New York, one rich and careless with people, one poor and hungry in a way she can’t say out loud, a season of parties and borrowed dresses, and then the book turns and keeps narrating from a position most novels wouldn’t dare hold. It sags a little in the middle, I’ll admit it, but the voice carries you over the soft spot and the last act is genuinely cold-blooded.

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

Lagos. A practical, put-upon woman keeps cleaning up after her beautiful sister, whose boyfriends keep ending up dead. Short, dry, and built like a moral vise. No big twist, doesn’t want one, doesn’t need one. You can finish it in an evening and it stays considerably longer.

Proceed with caution: the famous ones I’ll get yelled at about

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

Look, I get why it happened. Rachel, drunk and unraveling, watching a “perfect” couple from her commuter train, is a genuinely sad creation, and the blackout device makes her unreliability real rather than decorative. But the mystery underneath is thin, I clocked the ending from a very great distance, and this book is personally responsible for the trope I am now sickest of in the entire genre: the wine-soaked amnesiac narrator whose memory conveniently returns on the plot’s schedule. Hawkins did it first and best of the wave, fine. But it’s mid. Readable mid, respectable mid, still mid.

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

The twist is legitimately great. Mechanically perfect, honestly, one of the best-engineered reveals of the last decade. And everything around it is cardboard. The narrator has no inner life beyond what the plot requires, the Greek mythology garnish is doing far less than it thinks, and the woman at the center is a painting more than a person, which I’d call intentional if the book showed any other signs of intention. It’s a magic trick where you can watch the assistant wheel the mirror onstage and the finale still works. Read it in two sittings, feel nothing afterward. Some people call that a great thriller. We’re both right, which is annoying.

The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn

The novel itself is competent Rear Window karaoke: agoraphobic narrator, merlot, a window, a scream. Fine. The story around it is wilder than anything in it, because A. J. Finn is Dan Mallory, and the New Yorker’s 2019 investigation into his years of personal fabrications reads like a better unreliable-narrator tale than the one he wrote. Add that readers noticed the plot’s strong resemblance to an earlier film, and the whole thing becomes a hall of mirrors I find more interesting to think about than to reread. I can’t fully hate this book. I can’t respect it either.

Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough

The publisher marketed this one on a hashtag about the ending, which tells you where all the chips were placed. At 1 a.m., on the final chapters, I said “no” out loud, alone, twice, and I finally understood why Joey kept books in the freezer. The ending breaks genre in a way I won’t spoil, and it will either delight you or make you feel personally defrauded. I cycled through enraged, impressed, and enraged again, and I’ve landed on this: the book cheats. Your only decision is whether you find cheating fun. Some nights I do.

A good unreliable narrator doesn’t lie to you. She teaches you to lie to yourself, and then lets you find the receipts.

Where to start

If you want the closest thing to reading Gone Girl again for the first time: Sharp Objects, no contest, it’s the same nervous system.

If you want sentences, actual prose you can live inside: Rebecca or Eileen. If you want to gasp on public transportation: The Kind Worth Killing or Fingersmith, and Fingersmith is the deeper cut, so start there if you’ve already done your Swanson. If you want to feel morally filthy in a fun way: You or The Dinner. If you’ve only got one free evening: My Sister, the Serial Killer.

And if you want to have a screaming argument with a friend about whether an author is allowed to do what Pinborough did, hand them Behind Her Eyes and stand back.

What I’d actually tell you, though, is to stop chasing the twist. I did that for years and it’s like chasing a first kiss. The books that lasted, the ones still on my shelf after all the purges, are the ones where the lying voice was good company. Amy Dunne wasn’t unforgettable because she fooled me. She was unforgettable because some awful little part of me agreed with her, and fourteen years later I still haven’t decided what to do about that.