Words Jackie LaPlante
Psychological thrillers are a go-to when you really want to fall into a book. They offer suspense, plot twists and unreliable narrators that keep you turning the pages until the usually surprising finish.
Liz Nugent’s Little Cruelties (also released as Our Little Cruelties) is one of the best. It starts strong, at the funeral of one of three Irish brothers … although who is in the coffin is deliberately not made clear.
The novel continues with alternating chapters from each brother’s point of view. As the boys develop, the usual little cruelties of childhood are evident. From breaking one another’s toys to the eldest ditching the younger to see a movie with a girl, their unkindnesses, fuelled by their self-absorbed mother’s blatant favourtism, grow more serious as the boys age.
Using the brothers as unreliable narrators keeps the reader on their toes. How can we possibly trust the eldest brother, a womanizing film producer who takes his wife for granted? Yet he is self-confident and successful, a man who loves his wife and child even while straying as a husband and failing as a father. There is the youngest, the beautiful brother: a successful pop star; creative, kind, suffering poor mental health since childhood. And the middle child? Difficult to like, but trying hard to succeed in business and likeability, he is often the peacemaker of the family. Yet he is mean in an underhanded way, sneakily revealing his elder brother’s marital unfaithfulness and manipulating his younger brother under the guise of protecting the boy’s best interests.
It is Liz Nugent’s thorough and credible depictions of the brothers’ personalities that really hold the reader. The two eldest are quite unpleasant people yet show traces of kindness, while the sweet nature and struggles of the youngest make him empathetic. The spectre of the erratic mother and the unintended effect of her careless love add an intellectual depth to the brothers’ machinations.
The repetition of scenes from the boys’ childhood seen through the eyes of each brother creates a delightfully twisted plot, and the overriding question of which brother is dead remains unanswered until the end.
You can find more thrills in the following books. Gone Girl was the leader in the current craze of psychological thrillers. Rebecca, a classic from the 1930s, still captivates readers. And the final recommendation is not for the faint-hearted, but is clever, mixing classic elements of the psychological thriller with horror and black humour.
1. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
2. Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
3. Victorian Psycho, by Virginia Feito
