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The Psychological Thriller: An Overview

Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

The psychological thriller is a contradiction, a self-conflicted genre with a central

dialectic: we can understand the mind—we can’t understand the mind. In both cases, the mind

reveals itself to be almost unspeakable, defined simply and inscrutably in Conrad’s Heart of

Darkness by Colonel Kurtz in his dying breath: “The horror! The horror!” And like Marlow,

quoted in the epigraph, readers often respond less with sympathy than with schadenfreude.

Looking at the kinds of fiction most contemporary American readers seem to consider

“psychological thrillers,” a number of motifs dominate:



serial killers


psychotic protagonists


children in danger


apparent paranormal danger and/or paranormal gifts


revenge plots
psychotic antagonists who stalk the protagonist and who often are (or seem) beyond the


reach of the law


crucial scenes that depict psychological torture
misleading narratives and unreliable narrators (often resulting from some kind of


psychosis)


psychotic parents/spouses/significant others/apparent-innocents who seemed good


obsessive investigations (often of unsolved cases)


severe psychological illness, trauma, or memory loss in a main character;
and past traumas that revisit in a new danger

Many recent psychological thrillers illustrate more than one of these traits. For instance, S. J.

Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep (2011) involves psychotic parents/spouses who seemed good, in

addition to a main character with severe psychological illness or trauma. Stephen King’s Doctor

Sleep (2013) concerns apparent paranormal danger and/or paranormal gifts, as well as children in
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danger. And A. S. A. Harrison’s The Silent Wife (2013) employs misleading narratives and

revenge plots. In some cases, the accumulation of conventions approaches, reaches, and passes

absurdity. In James Patterson’s Alex Cross, Run (2013), the twentieth novel in his popular Alex

Cross series, the plot involves obsessive investigations of unsolved cases, psychotic antagonists

who seem beyond the law, serial killers, children in danger, revenge plots, psychotic spouses

who seemed good, crucial scenes that depict psychological torture, severe psychological illness,

and past traumas that revisit. Why did these specific themes and patterns arise in this genre in

America? What gave it its form?

In many essential ways, the psychological thriller is simultaneously the most modern and

the most postmodern of literary forms, in the sense that its basic characteristics and development

and its role in American culture mark it as demonstrative of how the modern period

distinguished itself from the past—and how the postmodern period has moved to question it.

Although works from writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James importantly prefigure

today’s psychological thriller, the fiction that resembles it prior to 1940 is associated primarily

with genres other than the psychological thriller (e.g., Gothic fiction, the sensation novel, and the

detective story). At what point, then, did the psychological thriller become recognizably its own

genre, and why? Ultimately, three recent historical trends prompted the rise of the psychological

thriller: Gothic fiction, Freudian psychoanalysis and psychological realism in fiction, and mass-

market publishing.

No one seems to agree on one definite method for determining which works belong in

which genres, or when the traits of one genre have become a new one. So how should the

psychological thriller be classified? As an evolutionary biologist might do, the literary critic can

test theories of phylogeny (a history of a species) for genre, moving backward through history
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through groups called clades—members of which all descend from a common ancestor—to find

unique ancestors to the genre in question, as well as common ancestors that genre shares with

those similar to it. Evaluating the motifs that I listed earlier, which indicate the “speciation

events” that prompted the many overlapping strains among psychological thrillers, I suggest the

following as the strongest currents that have come to define the genre:

 Psychotic killers as antagonist or protagonist, often beyond the reach of the law and often


prompting obsessive investigation; in many cases, the antagonist is a family member


Children in danger


Revenge for psychological trauma, often perpetrated by a family member
Unreliable narrators whose unreliability usually comes from some kind of psychosis,


sometimes in the form of found documents
Prominent citizens, close family relations, or presumed innocents who turn out to be


psychotic
Severe psychological illness, trauma, or memory loss in a main character that often
haunts and threatens long past the traumatic event, often caused by a family member

Looking at the list, social and personal fear surface as the main instigators of the psychological

thriller; specifically, these patterns reveal a profound dread that underneath appearances—either

one’s own, one’s family’s, or others’—lurk insidious secrets that threaten social and personal

identity.

The dread that dangerous secrets lie beneath once-safe sectors of life resonates strongly

across the nineteenth century, echoing particularly in Gothic fiction. That dread and the patterns

listed above come from anxiety about the modern age and its implications—especially with

regard to the limits of science; the simultaneous reliance on and unknowability of the individual,

particularly concerning the distribution of land and wealth into private property to individuals;

the overwhelming importance of family lineage to wealth and property; and the limits of the law.

The psychological thriller comes then from peculiarly modern dynamics: it confronts modern

anxiety about the nature of the mind and the Self through the Enlightenment struggle to

subjugate myth and superstition to the forms of science and rationality. But it simultaneously
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seeks to reveal the limits of knowledge of the individual self: humanity might be ultimately

unknowable and uncontrollable. The mind may even be unknown to itself.

The growing nineteenth-century understanding of the world primarily through

empiricism and objectivity ultimately compelled a radical equivalence of objects and people in

reasoning. “The real telos of reason,” Carl Freedman writes in The Incomplete Projects, “is not

just philosophical but social: modernity’s goal is to allow us to live rationally” (19), a goal it

draws from the Enlightenment. Indeed, rationality and objective equivalence was borne out in

capitalism, industrialization, and scientific progress, even as contemporary thinkers like Marx

challenged its cultural implications. Such critics were an effect of the Enlightenment worldview.

While rationality, reason, and mastery over nature were lauded in their replacement of the

mystery of superstition, unquestioning trust in authority, and fate, the limits and extremes such a

worldview presented were immediately feared. This dialectic found cultural expression in Gothic

art.

Jerrold E. Hogle remarks in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Gothic

Fiction, “the longevity and power of Gothic fiction unquestionably stem from the way it helps us

address and disguise some of the most important desires, quandaries, and sources of anxiety,

from the most internal and mental to the widely social and cultural, throughout the history of

western culture since the eighteenth century” (4). Gothic fiction is an uncanny extension of the

neoclassical, realistic phase that emerged in the early novel. Fiedler argues that “its fables

represent the hopes and fears of a group of intellectuals turned toward the future at a moment of

revolutionary readjustment” (136). The American and French Revolutions were the logical

cultural goals of Enlightenment thought, and when the latter resulted in horrific terror and

wanton murder, it cast a pall over former successes of rationalism. How could reason be so
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wrong about humankind? Fiedler suggests that “the guilt which underlies the gothic…is the guilt

of the revolutionary haunted by the (paternal) past which he has been striving to destroy; and the

fear that possesses the gothic and motivates its tone is the fear that in destroying the old ego-

ideals of Church and State, the West has opened a way for the inruption of darkness…” (129).

The positivity of knowledge in the Enlightenment was replaced by a new knowledge: there is

something unknown we did not know was unknown.

Since the modern period is defined largely through the rise of capitalism and an educated

and politically liberated middle class—cultural products of Enlightenment rationalism—the

secrets of the individual in relation to society are the limits with which Gothic fiction is

fundamentally concerned. Gothic obsession with the individual’s place in a property mutable

world arguably resonated more strongly than most other themes of the genre. The hierarchy of

society was no longer understood in terms of an unyielding and religious cosmos that dictated

how land was distributed, but rather in terms of how individuals related to each other through the

possession and retention of property. Subsequently, the control of accumulating and shifting

property was fundamentally mysterious since the individual remained mysterious. For all of the

realistic psychological probing that prompted the rise of the novel, Gothic fiction revealed how

unknown the individual could be.

While several Gothic writers from all over Europe and America are worthy of record in

helping shape the contemporary psychological thriller, none has had more lasting influence than

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49). He is the most important forebear of the psychological thriller. In

addition to the techniques and themes of his stories—which include unreliable narrators, revenge

plots, close relations who turn out to be psychotic, descriptions of the psychology of criminals

and victims as well as psychological torture—Poe’s prescient work within what would become
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many of the various genres that proceeded from Gothic fiction also helps demonstrate how the

psychological thriller developed particularly from Gothic fiction. Poe’s attention to

psychological terror had its greatest impact in horror, a genre intimately related to the

psychological thriller, but the motifs of the mystery of private individuals and property were

explored with greater zest and to greater effect in an off-shoot genre of Gothic fiction: sensation

fiction. Along with the Newgate novel of the early nineteenth century, the sensation novel was

an important genre in the development of crime fiction, and it was an important conduit to the

psychological thriller for the Gothic obsession with mysterious and perverted families. Unlike

Gothic fiction, sensation fiction was placed firmly in contemporary times and focused more often

than not on middle-class, country living. In novels like Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White or

Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, mysteries of inheritance and family lineage are

uncovered in the light of fantastic and horrifying incidents that appear supernatural (ghosts and

curses) but are revealed to have rational explanations, often based in new science (such as

psychoactive drugs). Moreover, sensation fiction’s attention to thrilling the reader and its great

commercial success in doing so illustrate the importance of genre fiction in the age of mass

publishing.

Gothic art declined sharply after the beginning of the twentieth century. As Richard

Davenport-Hines notes in Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin, the

decline coincided with the rise of Freudianism (325). Whereas Gothic and sensation fiction

capitalized on the boundaries of scientific discovery and hinted at the unknown in seemingly

undiscoverable human mind, the Vienna School of psychoanalysis began to give explanations for

that unknown. Mark Edmundson suggests that Sigmund Freud did nothing less than take “the

props and passions of terror Gothic…and…relocate them inside the self” (32). By describing
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childhood in terms of psychosexual development and modeling the Self on an engagement

between an instinctual drive (the Id), a realistic mediator (the Ego), and cultural internalization

controls (the Super-Ego), Freud provided a working model that depicted the Self as

fundamentally split, confirming the anxieties many were feeling after the upheavals of the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In some ways, this made the terror of the unknown even

worse. If everything is simply wrapped up in some mental tissue, all of humanity should be

knowable. But Freud was also exposing the irrationality at the center of rational humanity. The

fact that the essence of humanity remained so elusive despite its apparently physical basis was

more terrifying than supernatural phenomena.

Simultaneously motivated and scarred by humanity’s achievements following the

Enlightenment, late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century writers sought to break free

from old modes of representation and more accurately describe the fractured sense of Self and

community that many people felt in the post-industrial age. A major Anglo-American precursor

to the modernists of the twentieth century, Henry James (1843–1916) developed and popularized

an approach to fiction firmly rooted in an unflinchingly realistic look at the psychological

mechanics of living without reference to mythology, melodrama, or religion. And in The Turn of

the Screw, before Freud had even published his culture-shattering theories, James demonstrated

how Freudian psychological realism could reinvigorate Gothic fiction by grounding it in the

mind. Perhaps more important, James also greatly altered the literary depiction of the child.

Whereas nineteenth-century writers “paid tribute to the idyll of childhood innocence,” as Ellen

Pifer comments in her comprehensive book on children in contemporary literature (21), James

explored what Freud was developing at the same time in Austria: a “conscious intellectual

exploration of states of childhood” through his own “unconscious experience” (Edel 480). As
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Pifer argues, “it is clear that James participated in the same intellectual ferment that led Freud,

along with Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and others, to dismantle the edifice of nineteenth-century

thought” (25). As I have argued here, that edifice of thought already housed its own

contradictions, which the psychological thriller unveils.

But these literary–historical movements had not coalesced in any consistent or

recognizable format. As these anxieties over modernism fermented in various theories of life,

society, and the mind, industrialization moved inexorably forward, finding more efficient ways

to produce mass quantities of commodities to sell at higher profit margins. Although mass

publications had been targeting segments of the reading public with genre fiction throughout the

nineteenth century, those forms were mainly in serial magazines of varying quality (including the

penny dreadfuls of the nineteenth century and the pulps of the early twentieth century, as well as

the “slicks” like The Saturday Evening Post from every decade in both centuries). But these

formats were short and shoddy. They could not keep pace with the sale of novels, which had the

advantage of longevity and cultural legitimacy. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Penguin Books

and Pocket Books began selling pocket-sized, paper-covered books with durable, relatively high-

quality paper. They sold a combination of content, from reprinted classics to contemporary

“fluff” entertainment. And they sold quite well, especially after a heavy push to soldiers

stationed overseas with stretches of time to read. Soon after, more companies joined the

innovative market. The paperback boom of the 1940s was a quantum leap for publishing and

fiction, opening up the length and respectability of the novel form to new, more specific markets.

I mark the beginning of the early psychological thriller, then, with the intersection of

mass-marketing, psychological realism, and Gothic-inspired fiction. In this context, a useful

starting point for the first early psychological thriller would be the Daphne du Maurier (1907–
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1989) novel Rebecca (1938), which represents a transition from the Gothic (epitomize by her

grandfather’s Gothic fiction) and the popularity at the time of historical romances. But the

popularity of the psychological thriller could not have reached the heights it has in fiction

without the formal constraints the contemporary thriller imposes, which earlier books like

Rebecca exhibit to only a small degree. As a thriller, the psychological thriller should include

significant danger threatening the protagonist or someone/something the protagonist values to

keep the reader reading. That kind of tension sells well. But thrillers are also defined by their

ability to maintain suspense—tension about whether the protagonist will lose what he/she values.

While terror and suspense is relatively easy to create for a moment, it is difficult to sustain

reasonably over longer plots. The psychological thriller appears earlier in film since suspense is

easier to create and maintain through visual and sound cues. Thus, readers of genre fiction in the

1940s were used to reading shorter, serialized thrills in cheap magazines, including Black Mask,

rather than in novels. The hard-boiled fiction, as it was called, that appeared in these magazines

was violent and filled with uncertainty of the modern world. The heroes are deeply flawed and

the criminals are often regular people pushed into unforgiving circumstances. While Dashiell

Hammett, Horace McCoy, and Paul Cain, and others honed their craft on the pages of Black

Mask, they found promising new income in the form of the explosion of new paperback presses.

And the paperbacks that sold best were those that could grab readers’ attention and keep it

throughout. No doubt the gripping allure of film also inspired the publishing industry to find new

ways to keep its readers.

Two writers deserve special credit for popularizing the darker, more psychologically

oriented thriller writing that would come to prominence in the 1950s: William Faulkner (1897–

1962) and James M. Cain (1892–1977). In 1930, Faulkner published Sanctuary, in between As I
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Lay Dying and Light in August. He claimed it was originally written solely for money. As he

wrote in his preface to the 1932 Modern Library edition of the book, “I took a little time out, and

speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought

would be the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine…” Faulkner

reports that his publisher replied, “Good God, I can’t publish this. We’d both be in jail” (323).

Whatever rewritings he did in the meantime (and he claims they were extensive), the book was

published, and it did make a lot of money. Tawdry potboilers were proven hits, as Erskine

Caldwell, John O’Hara, and writers following proved. While the style of most thrillers in the

1950s and later do not approximate Faulkner’s entirely well, no standard had yet been

established. Thus, while it might seem indecorous to include a Faulkner novel as a psychological

thriller, it was just that—more so than du Maurier’s Rebecca, in fact. Kevin Railey points out

that the novel “has frequently been discussed as an exploration of evil and more recently as a text

delineating the cultural significance of the Oedipal conflict,” and Railey further argues that the

“psychoanalytical readings have in fact been the best readings of the novel…” (69). I would

synthesize these statements to say that Sanctuary is an exploration of evil because of its

exploration of Freudian psychosexual behavior and attitudes, particularly in its depiction of the

extreme violence that stems from repression and systemic psychosexual paternalism. Throughout

Sanctuary, Railey observes, a pervasive and oppressive social paternalism unremittingly

punishes Temple Drake for her “loose” ways (83).

If Faulkner’s writing has been too aligned with the twentieth-century canon to be

considered much of a psychological thriller, James M. Cain’s astonishing commercial success

with his first novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, marks a clear point after which the

psychological thriller is a recognizable if somewhat ambiguous genre. In addition to his taut

writing, Cain also probed what was relatively deviant psychosexuality in its time, roping in

mythological and psychoanalytical themes into his nightmare visions of the American dream.

His work demonstrates a consistent interest in the psychological inner-workings behind the

façade of modernity. For instance, his widely-praised Double Indemnity opens promising to tell

about “this House of Death, that you’ve been reading about in the papers,” swearing that “it

didn’t look like a House of Death….just a Spanish house, like all the rest of them in

California…” (217). Furthermore, Cain’s second full-length novel, Serenade, depicts an opera

singer’s psychological struggle to repress his homoerotic feelings for an old conductor through

his relationship with a Mexican prostitute. For all of the book’s explicit references to mythology,

Cain claims the book was prompted into publication by a prominent physician (Dr. Samuel

Hirschfeld), praised by a psychiatrist (Dr. James M. Neilson), and prescribed as reading in

psychiatry courses all over the country (Madden and Mecholsky 20–21). Of course, the book’s

views on race and homosexuality are caustically heteronormative, and would never be read now

for educational purposes. Nevertheless, Cain’s work also announces a new period in fiction via

his dual publishing with respectable hardcover publishing (Alfred A. Knopf) and paperback

publishing (like Avon). His cultural hybridity illustrates how increasingly meaningless the

divisions between high, middle, and low fiction would become by the twenty-first century.

After Faulkner and Cain’s work in the 1930s (and 1940s for Cain), as the paperback

industry developed, the psychological thriller took on more contemporary characteristics as

various writers explored the combined themes and techniques of Gothic fiction, psychological

realism, and hard-boiled writing. In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Freud’s theories

became much more mainstream, echoing to the depths of popular fiction. From the late 1940s

through the 1960s, armed with the tenets of pop psychology, crime writers forayed into the
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thoughts and actions of the psychologically disturbed. Two of the most important early

paperback writers involved in popularizing and capitalizing on Freudian themes were Cornell

Woolrich (1903–1968) and Horace McCoy (1897–1955), both of whom wrote throughout the

1940s and ‘50s. Both writers owe a major debt to Cain thematically, but each explored noir

themes in stylistically individual ways. In fact, Woolrich is hardly hard-boiled in that sense. His

work is much more atmospheric and operatic, and he delights in ruminating explicitly and

unremittingly on universalities and eternal symbols—a far cry from Hammett. Woolrich’s plots

center on strikingly psychological terror, usually from the reader and/or character’s

foreknowledge of a fatal situation. In fact, Woolrich’s ability to conceive of such plots led to the

adaptation of a number of his stories, including “It Had to Be Murder” into Hitchcock’s Rear

Window. Raymond Chandler gave him a back-handed compliment, calling him “the best idea

man” (qtd. in O’Brien 91). McCoy is also interested in depicting people on the precipice of

sanity, although much of his writing is stylistically hard-boiled. McCoy is well known for They

Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935), but it is with Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948) that he points

toward the greater possibilities of the psychological thriller since it is the first major book of the

period to really explore the psychology behind a psychopathic killer. In fact, the intelligent,

sadistic, violent, and psychologically traumatized Ralph Cotter narrates the whole book, which

follows his escape from prison and criminal dealings with a gang and a corrupt police force.

However, the real story and mystery is what haunts Cotter. Whereas Cain presupposes flaws and

trauma, McCoy seeks to explore in greater depth what kind of past could have made such a man.

Leonard Cassuto points out how McCoy’s novel prefigures the serial killer novel, but instead of

a catalog of the horrors a psychotic can commit, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye explores how a trauma

(in this case his confused murder of his own grandmother) can damage someone for life.
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Along with Woolrich and McCoy, the first writers who might be considered consistent

writers of the psychological thriller are Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995) and Jim Thompson

(1906–1977). And with them the genre arguably reaches its zenith, particularly since both of

their writings epitomize the most postmodern aspects of the psychological thriller, in the sense

Jean-François Lyotard meant it in The Postmodern Condition: as an “incredulity toward

metanarratives” (xxiv). Leonard Cassuto calls Highsmith the “quintessential fifties crime writer”

for her exploration of the psychological effects of guilt in an era “in the shadow of a mushroom

cloud…where the long arm of the House Un-American Activies Committee (HUAC) reached

into people’s most private spaces” (135). Highsmith’s 1950 debut was Strangers on a Train,

which was adapted to the screen by Alfred Hitchcock, and its themes are indicative of much of

the rest of her fiction. Cassuto argues in Hard-Boiled Sentimentality that “rootless, pervasive

anxiety nourishes Highsmith’s paranoid creative vision. Pursuit is a persistent theme…but her

characters don’t know where to run because they don’t know where the threat is coming from.

For Highsmith’s characters, the danger usually originates within—and it’s inexorable” (135). In

addition to depicting psychopaths, as she does so memorably in her Ripley novels, Highsmith

also casts light on how psychologically destructive—but bearable—guilt can be for an average

person. Like Woolrich, Highsmith is an inheritor of Poe who importantly transforms Poe’s

themes to a modern world. In Highsmith’s universe, as Cassuto remarks, “her characters never

get comfortable with themselves or each other in an ominous-feeling world… They’re always

looking around as though something terrible is going to happen to them—and something

frequently does” (135). Unlike Poe’s more Gothic universe, though, the full weight of literary

modernism and realism have crushed the sentimentality out of Highsmith’s fiction. In The

Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), for instance, Ripley is on the run from the very beginning from his
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wrong-doing in the world, and while he is threatened at every turn, no external force ever

actually stops him. Nor does he stop himself. While Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment

escapes justice only to find guilt too unbearable to live with, eventually turning himself in to the

police for proper punishment (and ultimately religious forgiveness), Ripley escapes justice but is

too self-preserving to end the guilt that yet seems to dog him. Ripley’s sad fate is his inability to

escape himself. Freud offered explanations for how the subconscious might make the mysteries

of the mind surface, but Highsmith showed how they might just release themselves without

being identified or stopped by a panoptic society.

With Highsmith, the psychological thriller finds greater sophistication than it had before.

Nevertheless, Jim Thompson just might be the psychological thriller author par excellence.

Whatever niceties in description Thompson lacks compared to Highsmith, he is her equal (and

occasional better) in terms of psychological depiction. As Geoffrey O’Brien contends,

Thompson’s ability to narrate so convincingly from within the mind of a psychopath leaves the

reader with “the uncanny feeling that this is too real to be fiction, that only a true psychopath

could so expertly have charted thought and abrupt, equally fragmented action…” (121). David

Glover argues that the characters in Thompson’s fiction “have become thoroughly demented and

the descent into the nether world of Norman Bates in Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959) and thence

of Francis Dolarhyde (‘the Tooth Fairy’) and Hannibal Lecter in Red Dragon is about to begin”

(146). Indeed, Thompson’s works are the beginning of the clearest examples of psychological

thrillers and they are in many respects the epitome of the genre because “in each case what starts

out as a disarmingly upfront first person narration is revealed as something far more

impenetrable and unsafe, enmeshed in its own craziness to the point where it is no longer really

clear what kind of entity is doing the speaking” (147). In Thompson’s fiction, more so than that
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by any writer before, the genre finally adopts an unusual characteristic that is unlike many

others. Genres usually tell what will take place in the narrative events (as in the espionage

thriller, the legal thriller, the medical thriller, and so on), but psychological thrillers also describe

the effect they have on the reader: this book is not only be about psychological thrills, it will

thrill you psychologically. Thus, from Thompson on, psychological thrillers in fiction and film

often experiment with ways to perturb the audience to greater degrees, frequently through

terrifying and horrifying plot points (which often appear at the end).

Thompson is one of the last of the hard-boiled writers in the psychological thriller genre.

In the 1950s, two writers began publishing works that mark the transition in the genre from its

hard-boiled era to the present one of mass-marketed, professional, commercial fiction: Robert

Bloch (1917–1994) and John D. MacDonald (1916–1986). Bloch, a protégé of H. P. Lovecraft,

originally wrote for pulps like Weird Tales, but he soon moved away from more supernatural

horror and began writing more realistically based crime and horror. He published his first novel,

The Scarf, in 1947, an early psychological thriller that follows a writer who compulsively kills

the women he patterns his characters from. It’s somewhat unaccountable that this novel did not

catapult him to fame. But it was in fact his 1959 novel Psycho (and its massively successful

Hitchcock film adaptation) that really transformed the genre. Inspired by real-life serial killer Ed

Gein, Bloch drew effectively and scientifically on modern psychology to push the limits of

horror away from the supernatural. The horror Bloch evoked was disgust in personality, which

he achieved by narrating within the psychotic mind and by portraying the actions of that mind.

Psycho begins with Norman Bates reading about Incas flaying people alive, making drums of

their skin, before following an age-inappropriate conversation he has with his mother. The reader

follows along as a creepy voyeur, interested in Bates’s unusual life, inducing a sensation similar
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to that of reading Woolrich’s fiction, but with far more eager revulsion. The cultural effect of

Bloch’s approach was the popularization of the serial killer novel, the most important subgenre

of the psychological thriller.

As important as Bloch’s contributions have been—particularly for his example to later

films and to Thomas Harris—John D. MacDonald’s writing signifies a broader but noticeable

shift. Although he is well known for his Travis McGee detective novels, MacDonald was a

prolific writer in other areas, publishing paperback novels and short stories in a wide variety of

pulp and slick magazines before finally publishing hardcover books. In some of MacDonald’s

1950s writing, the style and thematic attention approaches Thompson’s writing. Leonard Cassuto

describes many of MacDonald’s ‘50s paperbacks as depicting “morally detached murderers who

maim and kill for the pleasure of it” (241). Furthermore, MacDonald’s relation to Thompson and

Highsmith extends to their mutual affinity for questioning the metanarrative of modern progress.

MacDonald said when he wrote of evil, it was “a kind of evil which defies the Freudian

explanations of the psychologists, and the environmental explanations of the sociologists” (69).

In his PopMatters review of MacDonald’s paperback novels, Jeff Tompkins suggests that

MacDonald’s portrayal of a criminal personality in Soft Touch (1957) is “as chilling as any of the

psychopaths who stalk through Thompson’s fiction, and all the more effective for being so

understated…” But MacDonald did not always eschew psychology and sociology’s explanations.

In his early novels like The Executioners (1957), The Price of Murder (1957), The End of the

Night (1960), and many more, MacDonald vigorously explored the psychology of criminals,

particularly of self-centered sociopaths in violent confrontation with society. In fact, his literary

output from the 1950s into the 1960s reflects the central conflict at the heart of the psychological

thriller’s development. Steve Scott argues on his blog The Trap of Solid Gold that MacDonald’s
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fiction moved steadily from a “fascination with the environmental forces that shape criminal

action…seen in his early pulp stories but [which] really began to blossom in his mid-period

novels” to a conviction that he could not “offer any answers or opinions as to why people turn

out the way they do.” Current trends in psychological thrillers still usually vacillate between the

poles of understanding (even commanding) aberrant behavior and staring into the ultimately

unknowable void of the human psyche.

By the end of the 1950s, all of the cultural elements of the contemporary psychological

thriller had been introduced. The 1970s produced a blitz of writers that stressed the particular

patterns of those elements: Sidney Sheldon, Lawrence Sanders, Mary Higgins Clark, Stephen

King, V. C. Andrews, Thomas Harris, and more. In fact, thriller writers of all kinds were coming

into their own. Lawrence Sanders (1920–1998) popularized the motif of the obsessive detective

figure who is often personally involved or implicated in the crime being investigated. His first

novel, The Anderson Tapes (1970), is a political thriller of the kind so popular in the 1960s, but it

was in his second novel (The First Deadly Sin [1973]) that Sanders first used “the sure-fire

formula of crime, sex, violence and moral highhandedness that would sustain his career,” as his

New York Times obituary put it. As Patrick Anderson affirms, although Sanders gambled with

detective Edward X. Delaney and The First Deadly Sin, given its length and complexity, he

“achieved a psychological depth rarely seen in crime fiction” (75). Many writers (like James

Patterson and Patricia Cornwell) have followed Sanders’s pattern into the present, with greatly

varying levels of capability and success.

In the 1970s and 1980s, then, the psychological thriller bloomed. Writers of all

kinds popularized and capitalized on the inchoate strains of the genre embedded by Gothic

fiction, psychological realism and Freudian psychoanalysis, mass marketing, and hard-boiled
 18

fiction. Mary Higgins Clark (1929–) harnessed the Gothic and Freudian interest in lost

innocence, threatened and murdered children, and the psychopaths who endanger families in

novels like Where Are the Children? (1975) and A Stranger is Watching (1977). Stephen King

(1947–), an iconoclast whose work transcends genre, has made important contributions to

psychological thrillers with a great number of his novels, such as The Shining (1977), The Dead

Zone (1979), Thinner (1984), Misery (1987), The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999), and

Doctor Sleep (2013). King certainly participates in and influences an aspect of the psychological

thriller more closely aligned with the Gothic interest in the supernatural and with pulp fiction

horror, as preceded by Lovecraft and Bloch. V. C. Andrews (1923–1986) yoked Bloch’s

psychological horror approach, Gothic family mystery, and Freudian fears and fascinations with

familial sexuality and murder in novels like Flowers in the Attic (1979).

The most important among these writers of the psychological thriller flourishing is

Thomas Harris (1940–), who emerged on the publishing scene in the 1970s but altered the

landscape of psychological thrillers with his series involving Hannibal Lecter: Red Dragon

(1981), The Silence of the Lambs (1988), Hannibal (1999), and Hannibal Rising (2006). While

Stephen King has had an incalculable effect on publishing since his arrival, his oeuvre has been

so idiosyncratic that it has inspired few real imitators. But Harris’s Lecter marked what Patrick

Anderson calls “a turning point in the amount of sadistic stomach-turning violence that was

acceptable in mainstream fiction” (153). Anderson grants that “Harris’s intelligence and wit

made the depredations of Dr. Lecter and his other killers more or less acceptable to readers”

(153), but later imitations often simply capitalized on gore. Nevertheless, Harris’s second Lecter

novel, The Silence of the Lambs, advanced the serial killer subgenre even further by pitting Dr.

Hannibal Lecter against a woman, Clarice Starling. This pairing injects into the serial killer genre
 19

the hunter/hunted dialectic between the detective and the serial killer with even greater force than

Red Dragon’s FBI agent Will Graham provided. Harris was so successful with his overall

formula that all of his Lecter novels have been made into highly successful film adaptations, and

in 2013 NBC launched a television series based around Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham’s

burgeoning relationship.

Although the serial killer novel (and film) has dominated the psychological thriller genre,

a number of recent writers have still been evolving the genre. Dennis Lehane (1965–) seems to

be the most conspicuous writer to follow Harris’s dominance of the genre. In fact, in many ways,

Lehane is the consummate descendent of almost all of his predecessors in the genre. As he

demonstrates in Darkness, Take My Hand (1996), his second of the Kenzie–Gennaro novels

(which focus on Boston private detectives), Lehane’s writing can fall in the tradition of detective

novels (especially following Ross Macdonald and Lawrence Sanders’s psychological depth), but

it also operates within the horrific violence and psycho exploitation initiated by Bloch and

Harris. Furthermore, in novels like the Kenzie–Gennaro Gone, Baby, Gone (1998) and the stand-

alone Mystic River (2001), Lehane positions himself as a more competent writer than most of

child abuse and its consequences. Long after Henry James, Mary Higgins Clark, V. C. Andrews,

and many other followers, the use of children in psychological thrillers can be trite and mawkish.

Particularly with Mystic River, though, Lehane manages to confront childhood innocence and

violence in immediate, realistic, and thus psychologically terrifying ways. Lehane’s dedication to

psychological realism in Mystic River necessitated a slower pace than in most thrillers, indicating

that perhaps the newer generation of genre writers like Lehane, Karin Slaughter (1971–), and

Gillian Flynn (1971–), may break free somewhat from the hold thrillers have on commercial

fiction.
 20

Aside from the high points of books like Lehane’s Mystic River, Slaughter’s Kisscut

(2002), and Flynn’s Gone Girl, most psychological thrillers have continued to push with mixed

results the limits of taste and psychological horror to convey what David Glover calls the

potential monstrosity at the core of humanity that “resists or challenges scientific expertise, a

kernel of pure unmotivated evil that will always lie just outside official knowledge” (148), yet

which is still controllable and knowable. If the psychological thriller tries occasionally and

valiantly to invalidate psychiatric progress through its depictions of psychopathy (as Harris did

in The Silence of the Lambs), then it is also often yanking readers back to the cocoon of

Enlightenment thought to reassure them that the most sadistically evil thing imaginable is still

explainable by a bad childhood (as Harris did in Hannibal Rising). Within that dialectic, new

breadths of psychological realism are broached in the best fiction, but the psychological thriller

remains a conflicted genre with a dissociative identity disorder, wanting to explain horror when

horror proclaims itself to be unexplainable. As Marlow says in Heart of Darkness,

The mind of man is capable of anything -- because everything is in it, all the past as well
as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage -- who
can tell? -- but truth -- truth stripped of its cloak of time. Let the fool gape and shudder --
the man knows, and can look on without a wink. (32)

Or can he?
 21

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