Summer is full upon us, and what we need most are thrillers to take us out of our own heads. Along comes THIS LITTLE FAMILY (Other Press, 264 pp., paper, $15.99), a short, sharp debut by the French author Inès Bayard, which has murder in its first paragraph. Marie, a young Parisian mother, laces a lovingly prepared meal with poison and feeds it to her husband and her toddler before eating it herself. The worst part, perhaps, is that one of them survives.
How did she arrive at this terrible moment? The rest of the story explains what happened to make a lovely Frenchwoman with everything to live for descend into murderous despair. It is also a cry of anguish and fury about how easily men get away with committing sexual violence, and how devastating the consequences are for women.
Bayard is a muscular, propulsive writer, and the novel, elegantly translated by Adriana Hunter, feels urgent, immediate. You can’t stop reading, even as you want to look away.
As is so often the case, there is a dead body — Sara Morgan, slashed to death by her boyfriend, Blake Campbell — at the center of Nicola Maye Goldberg’s fascinating NOTHING CAN HURT YOU (Bloomsbury, 225 pp., $26). But the book is less about the murder itself than about its aftermath, the long tendrils of guilt, sadness, anger and confusion that stretch out from a single act, wrapping themselves around everyone they touch.
Each chapter focuses on a person affected by the killing, sometimes peripherally. There is a young woman in a Florida rehab facility who meets Blake years after the murder. (He got off by pleading temporary insanity.) There is the prosecutor in the case, whose private burden is a sister who never recovered from being raped 30 years earlier by three teenage boys.
There is Sara’s niece, a first grader whose tooth-related obsession will unsettle readers who remember Gillian Flynn’s “Sharp Objects.” There is a girl Sara babysat for; there are her parents; there is the troubled woman who discovered her body — each gets a moment. The last chapter is reserved for Sara, and Goldberg lovingly describes her not at the moment of death but at an earlier time, when she was young and brave and full of life.
Imagine a mental patient so malevolent, so diabolical, that anyone who comes into contact with him — psychiatrists, nurses, orderlies, other patients — is driven insane. Some of them commit suicide. That is the delightfully bonkers premise of Jasper DeWitt’s THE PATIENT (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 210 pp., $23), set in a forbidding state psychiatric institution in Connecticut.
Into this fraught atmosphere waltzes Parker, a full-of-himself young doctor eager to make his mark. What a fun challenge, he thinks: an untreatable patient, locked up for more than two decades, who is evil incarnate! Clearly he is the person to crack this case. Ha, ha is the correct response to this delusionary view. But it’s not until Parker meets Joe, the patient in question, that the reader begins to get an inkling of what he is up against.
Is Parker insane? Is Joe? How about the other doctors? And what are we to make of the noise emanating from Joe’s room? “It didn’t sound human at all,” DeWitt writes. “Instead, what emerged from that room was a sepulchral, moist, hacking chuckle that sounded like it came from a rotting throat.”
Debra Jo Immergut’s stunning YOU AGAIN (Ecco/HarperCollins, 265 pp., $27.99) feels eerily relevant, perfect for this time of deep uncertainty and rapidly shifting news. It is dreamlike and immersive, like falling into someone else’s alternative reality.
It is 2015 in New York City, and 46-year-old Abby Willard, who works for a pharmaceutical company, looks out her taxi window to see herself, walking down the street at the age of 22. Her inclination to write it off as a momentary illusion becomes harder to sustain when she keeps running into the same girl at all her old city haunts, doing the things she once did.
Back then she was wild, in love with a photographer who was addicted to heroin, preparing a portfolio of paintings for her art school application. What happened to her life as an artist? How did she get here?
There is more to disturb. One of Abby’s teenage sons seems to have joined an Antifa group, at least as it operates in Brooklyn — people who dress in black and hatch plans to overthrow the rich. Her marriage buckles. She starts to suffer from headaches, confusion, a sense of temporal porousness. There’s so much she wants to tell her younger self.
It turns out that there are a few things her younger self wants to tell her, too.
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Psychological Thrillers That Will Mess With Your Head - The New York Times
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