The Best Psychological Thrillers of the Month: October 2026

Here are five psychological thrillers out this month, all excellent, all different, and all bound to please. Many of the following books are also very much gothic, part and parcel of the psychological thriller’s gothic ancestors.

All blurbs are by me unless otherwise stated. Thanks for checking out the column! 

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Elizabeth Hand, Unspeakable Things
(Little, Brown)

Elizabeth Hand has long been a CrimeReads favorite, and in her latest, she’s outdone herself. Unspeakable Things is billed as a sort of prequel to Rebecca, which it certainly is, but the novel is also so much more. It’s a spiritual sequel to Hand’s turn-of-the-century Chicago-set Curious Toys, also using the language of cinema to understand queer desire, also playing with gender and genre. Set in the early 1920s, Unspeakable Things follows the romantic, erotic, and occasionally murderous adventures of two young women in Cornwall.

At the novel’s start, Olivia/Oliver (stand-in for Du Maurier and her childhood crossdressing alter ego) is happy living with her Shakespearean father and his actor partner, long-exiled from London over the scandal of their relationship. She loves her father and stepfather, she loves their drafty old country pile, and she adores running wild on the moors. She doesn’t want a debut, or to live in Mayfair, but she would quite like a friend. Enter Tamsin, with whom Olivia becomes immediately besotted. Tamsin, whose mother was present for Olivia’s breech birth (SO many good jokes about inverts). Tamsin, who is already suspected of one murder and quickly becomes instrumental in several more. Tamsin, who insists on coming along with Olivia to her first big costume party, with predictably dire results.

An amazingly crafted and delightfully playful reverse-gothic in which the heroines aren’t running away from the manor—they’re running towards it, probably for a game of Sardines with the other Bright Young Things.

Tom McCarthy, The Rhyl Poster
(NYRB)

This one might be be more of a political or legal thriller, but I think it has strong psychological undertones (and features a protagonist of rather unstable psychology) In The Rhyl Poster, a traumatized legal theorist working on drafts for the European Union’s most important legislative organization becomes equally addicted to drugs and his own grand theories, giving his dealer access to secret documents and preparing a cosmic manifesto when he should be working on a monumental report with implications for millions of EU citizens.

Nneoma Ike-Njoku, The Water House
(Summit Books)

This moody gothic earns all the back-cover comparisons to Rebecca and Jane Eyre, and then some! Set in Nigeria during the lead-up to civil war, The Water House follows a reform school graduate, drifting through life and fake-engaged to a brooding widower; when scandalous revelations put an end to her relationship, she returns to her family home, a decaying estate built at the entrance to a swamp and concealing a terrible secret.

Tanya Pell, This B Just Won’t Die!
(Gallery)

Scream queen Barbra, previously known as Barbie during her short-lived acting career, is not having a good time. Maybe that’s because she’s been hired to return to Barbie’s Scream House, the original filming location of her iconic horror franchise, hoping to restart her career with a documentary ode to the cult classic. As the film date approaches, a string of brutal murders occur in ways that mimic the OG films, and a stalker dressed as the film’s villain starts leaving terrifying messages in Barbie’s dressing room. But hey, at least she’s got a new love interest, and her decades-old frenemy relationship with her biggest costar is finally becoming a real friendship. So she’ll stick it out. Even if it kills her. So fun!

Lyndsay Faye, Raven
(Mysterious Press)

Lyndsay Faye’s new novel is a delightful romp through the Gothic, antebellum mid-Atlantic; it tells the story of a young woman shuffling from one temporary home to another after the death of her beloved mother. She passes from a theater troupe through the homes of strange relatives to a laudanum-permeated Baltimore townhouse, and eventually a large manor house where she meets a like-minded young man interested in the occult, searching for an Elixir of life that might help his ghostly invalid cousin. And at some point along the way… our heroine is murdered. Read this book and you’ll be bored nevermore. –OR