ALERT! This article includes spoilers ahead for the following books: And Then There Were None, Shutter Island, and Sharp Objects.
I was a teenager, holed up in a corner of my family’s rented vacation home, when I turned the final page of And Then There Were None. It was the first Agatha Christie novel I’d ever read, and when I finished I dropped the book to my chest, mind flooded with a strange mixture of bewilderment and satisfaction.
It was my first experience with the power of the twist.
The twist has endured for millennia as a pillar of our most beloved stories, from the ancient Greeks performing Oedipus Rex to Darth Vader revealing Luke’s patronage in The Empire Strikes Back. In crime fiction, especially, the twist is so prevalent that experienced readers have come to expect it. But popular as it is, the twist is still often underestimated.
The basics of a twist are familiar: a change in plot that surprises the reader and radically alters the direction of the story. But a twist can do much more. The best twists alter not just a novel’s plot, but also reframe the reader’s fundamental understanding of its characters. They subvert the reader’s expectations, surfacing hidden themes that lurk under the story’s surface. The twist, when done well, can be the key that unlocks the true depth of a story, causing it to resonate with readers long after they’ve finished—just as And Then There Were None still lingers with me today.
Here are some of my favorite illustrations of the power of the twist:
And Then There Were None
We can only start with the world’s best-selling mystery. And Then There Were None’s plot elements have rightfully become hallmarks of the genre. Ten strangers. A mysterious invitation. An isolated island. Upon arrival, a recording accuses each guest of committing a murder sometime in their past. One by one the guests are killed, each in a distinct, chilling manner that follows the lines of a nursery rhyme.
The island becomes a prison of paranoia as the guests turn on each other, new accusations swirling each time a body falls. Finally, the last guest remaining hangs herself, and investigators arrive to find an unsolvable crime: ten guests, ten bodies, with no clues to the killer.
Only in the epilogue is Christie’s final twist revealed: one guest, a retired criminal judge, has masterminded the entire gathering. He faked his own death to avoid suspicion while killing his fellow guests as retribution for the crimes of their pasts. For his final act the judge took his own life, but only after stuffing his confession into a sealed bottle and throwing it out to sea.
The obvious genius of the twist is how neatly it ties a bow on the novel’s intricate construction. Christie herself referred to And Then There Were None as “a better piece of craftsmanship than anything else I have written.” But the twist also broadens the themes of Christie’s story. The judge orchestrated and executed the murders to exact justice upon those who had wrongly slipped through the cracks of the traditional legal system. The psychological puzzle of the plot has been solved in a deeply satisfying manner. But the twist creates new questions that are more ephemeral and unanswerable: about morality, vengeance, and the nature of justice.
Shutter Island
The action in Dennis Lehane’s psychological thriller also centers on a desolate island brimming with paranoia. Protagonist Edward “Teddy” Daniels is a U.S. Marshal investigating the disappearance of a patient from the island’s psychiatric hospital. Daniels gradually uncovers a conspiracy surrounding the hospital’s treatment of its patients. Privately, he is also searching for a patient named Andrew Laeddis, whom Teddy believes murdered his wife two years prior.
The twist comes at the story’s climax, when Teddy is revealed to be the very patient he is searching for: Andrew Laeddis (an anagram of Edward Daniels). His investigation has been an elaborate construct of his own mind, built on his delusions and brought into reality as a “role-playing experiment” by hospital administrators. Andrew’s wife, Dolores, is the missing patient—Andrew killed her himself after she drowned their children. Unable to cope with his own culpability for the disintegration of his family, Andrew constructed the alternate identity of Teddy Daniels, along with the nature of the preceding investigation, as an escape from the guilt and devastation that has consumed his rational mind.
The hospital’s role-play experiment appears to succeed. Andrew breaks through his delusions, accepting responsibility for the death of his family—until a final, ambiguous coda hints that Andrew has regressed back into his delusions, with the reader left to determine if he’s done so intentionally or not. The twist moves Shutter Island from a conspiracy-driven thriller into something darker and more profound: a parable about the devastating power of guilt and the thin, fragile line that separates reality from delusion, sanity from madness. Is it better to live in a painful, terrifying reality, or succumb to the comfortable numbness of an elaborate delusion?
Sharp Objects
Gone Girl gets well-deserved hype, but Gillian Flynn’s earlier novel has a final twist that hits you right in the gut.
The story revolves around the complex relationships between three women: Camille, our protagonist; her estranged, somewhat imperious mother, Adora; and Amma, Camille’s thirteen-year-old half-sister. Camille has returned to her hometown to investigate the murders of two teenage girls. Damaged by the childhood death of her sister, Camille is trapped in a cycle of destructive self-harm, while Amma, in contrast, presents as the pure, innocent, childlike “good girl.”
The twists begin when it’s revealed that Adora has long abused her daughters via Munchausen by proxy, making her responsible for the death of Camille’s sister. Camille and Amma are rescued before they can come to further harm, and Adora is charged for the deaths of the local girls. But in a final twist, we learn that Amma killed her fellow teenagers, jealous of the attention Adora bestowed upon them.
The twists recontextualize the very core of Sharp Objects: the web of relationships between its three leading women. What initially appears to be a story about an abusive mother instead becomes a deeper, more sinister treatise on the cycle of abuse: how a pattern of violence can trickle down through generations, manifesting in unpredictable and terrifying ways. All the while, it exploits the reader’s preconceptions about feminine roles, subverting expectations to deliver a final, chilling realization about Amma, the murderous teenager who masked her darkness with a facade of childlike innocence.
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