There’s something that’s just so much fun about watching characters behave badly. When they make jaw-dropping choices, hide ugly secrets, and think terrible thoughts, it allows us to feel the thrill of doing something illicit within a safe fictional playground.
While reading helps us develop empathy and understand the motivations and mental states of others, there’s something especially engrossing about characters who revel in their bad behaviors—characters we love to hate. Like listening to good gossip, witnessing these characters make bad choices allows us to safely observe scandalous behavior without being the source of it. We get to traipse around in the shoes of morally gray or morally bankrupt characters while preserving our social standing and exploring the boundaries of our morality.
I think there’s a bit of nuance to our relationship with these characters—it’s not that we strictly hate them, it’s that we’re really judging them. We’d never do the things they do, especially at the expense of others, but we also can’t look away. These characters can be impulsive or selfish or dangerous; sometimes they’re petty or judgmental themselves—all traits we’re socially conditioned to avoid.
It’s not that we want to do the dubious things they do, but that there’s something freeing in imagining what it would feel like act to without judgement. What’s more, the characters’ behavior is a lens through which to explore power, an element that’s inherently pleasurable to read about.
My thriller Made You Look, about a sponsored content creation trip that turns deadly for a group of influencers who are snowed in with a killer, packs in plenty of these pleasures: rich people behaving badly, morally gray characters, and strained friendships—and that’s before you throw a killer into the mix.
It’s not that the characters are beyond reproach, it’s that sometimes they don’t care, or that they’re too self-absorbed to notice. There’s the character who makes choices without thinking about others; the one who’s not afraid to say what everyone’s thinking; the ones who expect others to clean up their mistakes—all of them portraying a life of ease while hiding the amount of work it takes to make it look easy.
Yep, it’s not hard to hate them. And because their profession naturally sets them up to be judged, we don’t feel quite so bad judging them ourselves. In fact, it’s part of the thrill.
Here are ten thrillers with characters you’ll love to hate.
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May Cobb, The Hollywood Assistant
When a personal assistant to a famous Hollywood couple gets caught in their secrets and lies, she lands in the middle of a murder investigation. May Cobb is the queen of writing unlikeable women, and in this thriller she delivers plenty to enjoy, from the assistant who continues to make questionable choices to the angsty drama-magnet wife she works for.
Jesse Q. Sutanto, You Will Never Be Me
In this delicious thriller, influencer Meredith gets revenge on her former best friend—an influencer who’s surpassed Meredith’s own social media standing only to drop her. But Meredith made Aspen what she is, and she knows exactly how to break her.
Between stalking Aspen, sabotaging her career, and stealing her content ideas, Meredith’s a walking red flag, but with characters that you love to hate at the wheel, it’s impossible to stop reading this wild ride of a story.
Olivia Worley, People to Follow
In this young adult thriller, ten teen influencers travel to an island to film a reality show, but when one ends up dead, they realize the cost of getting canceled could be their lives. Packed with plenty of secrets and betrayals, the story has a host of characters who showcase the worst traits of influencer culture: toxic relationships, entitlement, predatory behavior, and fakeness.
The characters are messy in the best and most intriguing way.
Lucy Foley, The Midnight Feast
In this locked-room thriller, opening night at a luxe coastal resort brings together friends, enemies, and old secrets with deadly results. Multiple points of view provide a glimpse into each character’s head…and into their lies. Everyone’s hiding something, and you can trust that when those secrets collide, it’ll be disastrous.
Jo Piazza, Everyone is Lying to You
In this Gone Girl meets tradwives tale, everyone is, well, lying to you. Piazza pulls back the curtain on an influencer lifestyle that’s knowingly meant to deceive. At the center of the story is the disappearance of a tradwife momfluencer who’s made motherhood look idyllic to rich reward.
As her estranged friend tries to uncover what happened to her, you can’t help but ask which lies the characters have created and which are the ones they’re trapped in.
Kieran Scott, People Will Talk
This juicy, gossipy good time of a book follows three women who must work together to clear their names after they’re implicated in the murder of a bride on her wedding night. All three women have a motive to have wanted the bride dead, making them great suspects and also great fun to read about.
The characters knowingly make bad choices—and keep making them!—and it’s so much fun to watch as they scramble to deal with the repercussions while solving a murder.
Emma Cline, The Guest
After a young woman is asked to leave the Long Island home of the older gentleman she’s been staying with, returning to the city where trouble awaits isn’t an option. Desperate to stay, she manipulates each of the elite wealthy people she encounters, leaving destruction in her wake.
A talented grifter, her morality is dubious, and while her actions make her one of the most unlikable characters I’ve read, her astute insights make her so compelling you’ll race through this story.
Lisa Unger, Close Your Eyes and Count to 10
A game of extreme hide and seek hosted by an adventurous reality TV star turns deadly in this atmospheric thriller. Each character has a different reason for traveling to the island where the game is held, and some of the most desperate motives lead to chilling choices.
Sarah Harman, All the Other Mothers Hate Me
When the child who bullied her son goes missing and her son becomes the prime suspect, failed girl-band member Florence must find the missing child and clear her son’s name or risk losing him. Florence is a party girl who always takes the easy way out and makes questionable choices, and while her love for her son shines through, she teeters just on this side of being unredeemable.
The tension between wrong and right makes the story—like Florence herself—a train wreck you can’t look away from.
Holly Jackson, Five Survive
In this young adult thriller, six friends on a road trip become stranded when their RV breaks down in a remote location with no cell service. When they discover that someone who wants one of them dead has trapped them until the target gives up their secrets, each flawed character plays a cat-and-mouse game with the truth.
The trapped teens will need to work together to survive, but with some self-righteous—and self-serving—characters in the group, there’s just as much danger inside the RV as outside its walls.
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