In the last two months, we’ve all witnessed a truly unprecedented situation. Suddenly, all the stores are closed, restaurants are shuttered, and even the simple act of taking public transit has become fraught. With everything on lockdown, crowded cities have become a whole lot less appealing. Confined in an apartment with a stockpile of pasta and a towering TBR pile, it’s easy to find yourself wondering: how cool would it be right now to live on a private island somewhere, or on a yacht, or at least in a camper in the middle of the wilderness?
Maybe not so cool. Here are my favorite thrillers set in isolated places.
The Magus by John Fowles
Picture this: in the 1950s, Nicholas leaves England for Greece to work as an English teacher at a boarding school but really to escape an insistent ex-girlfriend who didn’t handle their breakup too well. He finds himself on a paradisiacal but utterly isolated Greek island, where he meets an enigmatic millionaire and the beautiful twin sisters in his thrall. And then the mind games begin.
This classic novel is a doorstopper of about nine hundred pages, but they fly by as you struggle to figure out where the truth lies among the many exquisite layers of deceptions. Chock full of literary references and allegories, The Magus is a very early precursor of psychological thrillers like Gone Girl. The author has a more straightforward thriller to his credit as well—The Collector, a grisly tale of a kidnapper from his own point of view that’s truly ahead of its time.
Fake Like Me by Barbara Bourland
A meticulously researched journey into the world of contemporary art, Fake Like Me takes us to a remote abandoned resort where a group of artists once created their scandalous masterpieces, led by sculptor Carey Logan who later killed herself by drowning in the lake at that very compound. The nameless protagonist of Fake Like Me (so nameless that even her passport is rendered blank at the start of the novel) is here to recreate the paintings that got destroyed when her building burned down—and she must do it in complete secrecy because the paintings have already been sold. Oops.
Soon, she stumbles upon a box of unfamiliar drawings and finds herself drawn into the mystery of Carey Logan’s death. Fake Like Me isn’t only about art and fraud but about disillusionment and the disintegration of our most sacred idols.
Kill Creek by Scott Thomas
I love books about writers, especially those that show the less cutesy or less glamorous side of it. So I was initially drawn to this book by the, ahem, colorful cast of horror writers who all end up at the same allegedly haunted house in search of inspiration, to say nothing of a career boost. Inspiration is what they find in this creepy abandoned house, site of many strange happenings. And then there’s the requisite bricked-in door hiding something ominous and terrible… Before long, each of the writers is penning their own novel based on their time at the house, but when they suddenly hit a (metaphorical and literal) wall, they must go back to Kill Creek to find out how the story ends.
The writer archetypes are spot-on perfect and over-the-top, which goes hand in hand with the recurring theme of the book: to what extent are the horrors that haunt us the product of our own minds?
Day Four by Sarah Lotz
You don’t have to read The Three to enjoy the follow-up by Sarah Lotz. Seemingly unrelated to the first book, Day Four takes place on a cruise ship. On the fourth day of the cruise, in the middle of a storm, something goes terribly wrong, and the ship is mired in the middle of the ocean with a dead engine, a dwindling food supply, and, the horror, no wi-fi. And someone on board just committed murder—although you’ll soon realize it’s about the least creepy and disturbing thing happening on board this cursed ship. Lotz writes these claustrophobic settings so vividly you’ll get goosebumps, and she’s not the kind of writer to deliver neat endings with a bow on top. On the contrary, you’ll walk away from this book with a creeping sense of unease that’ll follow you around for weeks.
The Frozen Dead by Bernard Minier
There’s something about French thrillers that sets them apart. How dark are they willing to go? Very dark, if this book is any indication. I first became familiar with The Frozen Dead by the French author Bernard Minier when I stumbled upon the Netflix series. The moment I heard those opening credits with Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt sung by a children’s choir, I was in! This novel is set in a small town in the French Pyrenees, an icy, isolated, barely accessible place. And the high security mental institution nearby doesn’t help its reputation, especially once a mutilated body of a horse is discovered nearby and Commandant Martin Servaz is called in to investigate. Soon it becomes apparent that the horse is just the beginning, and a complex and fiendishly dark revenge story unfolds. The novel is the start of a series, and the latest installment, La Vallée, comes out this year.
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