I love audio thrillers, and I’m not the only one. Maybe it’s a trickle-down effect from the true-crime podcast boom, or the leap in production quality, but crime and thriller novellas written specifically for audio rather than the page are thriving. According to a recent Los Angeles Times report, audiobook sales rose 13 percent in 2024, pushing the industry into multi-billion dollar territory. Of the 2025 Audible Original fiction titles released between July and September, nearly half were thrillers.
Audio first storytelling brings to mind the experience of old radio plays. They were purely acoustic: using voice performance and sound alone to tell the story, like a movie for your ears. I still remember sitting on a stool at the kitchen bench in my school uniform watching my mother make dinner when a play came on the radio. I couldn’t have been older than ten and they were a rarity by this stage, but we both listened in silence, enthralled, smiling at each other every so often at funny or strange parts of the story. The popularity of radio plays began its golden era in the early 1920s. Now, a hundred years later, they are making a comeback on our devices.
Spotify Exclusives and Audible Originals lead the charge in the aural storytelling space, joined by smaller studios like QCode, while the big publishing houses are quickly expanding their audio divisions with initiatives like Penguin Audio Exclusives. A new, top-tier production seems to drop almost weekly, often featuring a cast of household names.
These stories seem to resonate with people whose hands are always busy. I’ve spoken to Uber drivers, long-haul truckers, and cleaners who’ve told me they rely on these productions to get through long shifts. I found solace in them myself in the early days of motherhood —pushing my sleeping son in his pram around the neighborhood, headphones in, trying to stay awake. The fast pace of audio thrillers was the only thing that could hold my foggy attention.
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A Movie for Your Ears
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Since listening to that radio play with my mother, I’ve loved the idea of a complete cinematic soundscape. It was the approach I took in my first audio thriller back in 2023, This Isn’t Happening, about a date that goes wrong. The aural angle allowed me to add something unique: not only do listeners hear the date in real time, but they also hear the thoughts of the main character who is far less enamored then she is pretending to be.
This approach allows for such creative ideas by authors and lets the producers shine with innovative sound design. Here are two of my favorites who’ve taken this approach:
Dan Blank, Carrier
This is an episodic take on the audio thriller, with full atmos surround sound and narrated by Cynthia Erivo. It follows a young woman who takes on a job as a long-range trucker, only she has no idea what she’s carrying in her cargo hold. It’s a fully immersive listening experience with great use of CB radio communication between truckers as the mystery unravels.
Wendy Walker, Mad Love
This one is truly like an audio movie, with six voice actors (including Alexis Bledel) and full sound effects and atmos. A newly married couple is found shot in their bed, the play-boy husband dead and his rich older wife fighting for her life in hospital. Her teenage children, and the gun, are missing. This is like the best kind of B-movie: fun, salacious and addictive.
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Audio to Explore Psychology
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There is something undeniably intimate about the experience of listening to audio. A great narration is like a good friend telling you a story, or perhaps whispering a confession in your ear to something nefarious. Here are some of my top picks that use the audio format to delve into the intimate spaces of relationships and psychology.
Christian White and Summer De Roche, Still House
This was the very first audio thriller I listened to. It scared me so much at one point that I stopped dead in my tracks, goosebumps rising on my skin. It’s told with two voice actors playing a married couple who visit their rental house after the occupants disappear. White and De Roche are a couple themselves and deftly explore how a long-term relationship can corrode over time, and the voice actors’ two perspectives bring the duality of marriage to life.
Rachel Howzell Hall, How it Ends
Marti is in the midst of a difficult divorce when she moves house to start over. However, her new sanctuary turns out to be anything but. The narration here takes the cake, Joniece Abbott-Pratt voices the character of Marti pitch-perfectly. How It Ends is clever and witty, as well as incredibly harrowing in some points. It’s one that had me actually looking for extra housework to do to keep listening.
J.P Pomare, Tell Me Lies
This novella starts with a bang: a psychologist watches one of her patients waiting at a train station, then pushes him onto the tracks as the train speeds through the tunnel. Pomare’s narrative then takes us back to a few weeks before the event as we see the psychologist both at home and in sessions with her patients and learn what led to this horrific event.
Ashley Kalagian Blunt, Like, Follow, Die
When a detective knocks on the door of an exhausted mother, she knows exactly why: her teenage son Ben has done something terrible. This is a longer audio original (clocking over 9 hours) but every minute is earned as it unpicks exactly what Ben did, and the online communities that drove him to commit such an unthinkable crime.
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Experimentation with the Form
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I’m fascinated by the inventive ways writers use the form, weaving in diegetic recordings like voicemails, phone calls, interviews and interrogations to pull listeners deeper into the narrative. Sometimes this is mixed with regular prose, other times it’s more epistolary.
This mix of recordings and prose was the approach I took in my new audio thriller The End of The Ski Season, which was inspired by those the long, circular days of early motherhood. It’s about a journalist on the edge of a comeback who stumbles upon a cold case: a 1980s double-murder of a couple at a ski resort. Overwhelmed by the realities of being a mother, she becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth even if it fractures the fragile new life she’s built. I wanted to explore the compromises women make and what happens when you push them to the edge, then push just a little bit more. The monologues that the journalist records feature women in their sixties and seventies recounting what they witnessed of the crime in 1980, and how it shaped the people they became.
Sara Gran, Marigold: An Investigation of an American Haunting
Marigold is entirely made up of an interview between a paranormal investigator and a young woman (voiced by Zoe Kazan) who claims the house she grew up in was haunted. The narration is expertly creepy, and the story unravels to be about much more than a haunting: it’s about history, urban development and a family falling apart.
Anna Downes, Break Me Down
I loved how playful Downes is with form in her biting critique of acting culture, featuring an ex-child star who joins a cult-like actors studio. Break Me Down uses ten voice actors (including Yael Stone), and the story is segmented by fake gossip-podcast episodes. The story was like a mix between Bill Hader’s TV show Barry with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.
Aditi Brennan Kapil, Marrow
Kapil’s story is more like a play than a novella, featuring recorded interviews, monologues, and voice notes. From start to finish the production is steeped in tension, atmosphere, and voice. It follows a journalist who is given the career defining opportunity of interviewing a famous reclusive writer, but rather than speaking about her work, the writer confesses increasingly eerie tales of her childhood with a genuinely shocking conclusion.
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