No book is written in a vacuum, and After the Eclipse isn’t any different. I’ve always loved reading crime novels that draw on setting and atmosphere to create an intense reading experience, especially those that feel somehow claustrophobic and make you itch with discomfort. All the better if they’re novels that you can’t stop thinking about afterwards. Before (and during) writing After the Eclipse, I had an idea of the sorts of books I loved but it was only after I finished drafting the early version of Cassie’s story of grief and loss that I realised I had really been writing a love letter to some of my favourite crime novels.
Here are nine of the darkest, most gripping, atmospheric thrillers that have stayed with me ever since I read them, and which I recommend every week to the customers who come into the book shop where I work.
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
Although I read and loved Flynn’s Gone Girl, I think Sharp Objects is my favourite. It’s a dark, gritty novel that follows a journalist as she returns to the toxic town and family that she left behind to investigate the disappearance of two young girls. The liquid Missouri heat, as draining and damaging as the people in Camille’s hometown, is a character in its own right. The perfection of Flynn’s writing is matched by the slow, inevitable unfolding of the plot as Camille becomes embroiled once more in the lives of the people around her, and forced to accept her own tragic childhood loss. It really is a book that doesn’t shy away from the ugliness of human nature, and is perhaps the novel I most wish I had written.
The Ice Twins by S. K. Tremayne
I’m a sucker for any books about twins. After a tragic accident involving the death of one of their twins, Angus and Sarah move to a remote Scottish island to build a new life for themselves. I could almost taste the salt spray and feel the vicious ocean winds as the couple’s relationship broke down, driven by disturbing revelation that they might have been wrong about which of their daughters died… I love how spooky this book is!
The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel
This is a novel about dark truths and family secrets. It’s also another novel that relies on atmosphere to drive the tension up and up as Lane returns to her grandparents’ estate in rural Kansas to look for her missing cousin, Allegra, and is forced to face some painful truths about her family. I love books with endings that feel both surprising and inevitable, and this one had both, plus sumptuous prose and a town dripping with oppressive summer heat.
The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne
Yes, the title is from Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale of the same name. Yes, it’s a creepy thriller about a woman who was raised by her mother’s abductor—and who is now the best-qualified person to track him and put him back in jail, before he finds her. Helena’s story is realised through intense flashbacks to her childhood and the life she and her mother shared with the man who kept them both hostage; the marshland where they lived is so vividly captured you can almost taste the tang on the air. This one is oozing with atmosphere from the outset, and threaded with a dark fairytale (the best kind).
Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough
This is one of the most phenomenal books I’ve ever read. On one hand it’s a slow-burn psychological thriller about the cracks forming in a marriage—and on the other hand, it is something entirely different—of course to say what, exactly, would be to spoil it. It’s clever, deliciously plotted, with the most surprising ending of any book I’ve ever read (and I’m a renowned twist-spotter), causing the Twitter hashtag #WTFthatending to entice readers further. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Exquisite by Sarah Stovell
Exquisite is another slow-burn, bubble-under-the-surface novel about two women who meet at a writer’s retreat. One is more advanced in her writing career than the other, and the two form a relationship that is both heady and toxic. The atmosphere here is less about setting than it is about the central relationship—about a developing obsession that somehow manages to be both dark and dangerous, and also not out of the norm. Bo and Alice’s story is one that had me holding my breath out of fear for what might happen.
In the Woods by Tana French
The first time I read this book I didn’t sleep properly for a week. Not because it was especially scary, but because it was unsettling. Its Dublin setting is lushly realised, drawing on both a modern storyline focusing on the murder of a twelve-year-old girl and also an event that happened twenty years earlier—the disappearance of two children and the discovery of a third gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail about what happened. I love crime novels that echo with pain of the past, and this novel does exactly that, drawing on the secrets of Detective Bob Ryan, and the impact the case has on his relationship with his partner and best friend, Cassie. In the Woods is richly atmospheric, lyrical and haunting, without compromising on the gut-punch effect that well-plotted crime does so well.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Although not officially a crime novel, no list about atmosphere would be complete without the inclusion of The Secret History. When a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college lose one of their own to murder, the claustrophobic closeness of their friendship begins to gnaw away at them, leading to obsession, betrayal and corruption. Tartt’s writing is so completely evocative that you feel a part of their elitist world, surrounded by dusty books and too much booze, and I felt bereft and exhausted after finishing this one.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Harriet Vanger disappeared over forty years ago from an island—and nobody went in or out on the day it happened, leaving a small pool of suspects. Years later, her aged uncle continues to seek the truth and he turns to a journalist and a hacker to solve the crime. This one has had two high-profile film adaptations, plus translations into many languages (including English), all of which do a fantastic job of capturing the setting: brutal, confined, bleak, and perfect for a crime investigation. By which, of course, I mean it’s absolutely not perfect at all. The family involved are resistant to Mikael Blomkvist’s questions, the winter weather cuts them off from the rest of the world, and even Harriet herself doesn’t seem to want to be found. The perfect storm of traits for a gripping thriller, and even if the Swedish legal complexities did baffle me at first, they were worth sticking with for a killer ending.
