5 Cinematic Thrillers to Rival Movie Night: A Guest Post by Tessa Wegert
I’m on maternity leave! During this time, a few of my favorite authors offered to step up and write guest posts so that this blog would remain active while I adjust to my new role as a mother. I may also be a bit slower to respond. Thanks for understanding and for being so supportive of me, my family, and my blog. Want to donate a few dollars to keep this blog running or perhaps contribute to my diaper fund? You can do so on Venmo or Paypal.
5 Cinematic Thrillers to Rival Movie Night: A Guest Post by Tessa Wegert
Movie nights have always been a staple in my home. There was a time during college when I thought I might like to work in film, and loaded on as many film studies courses as I could. I ultimately became a novelist instead—but I’m still drawn to movies that excite and surprise me, especially when there’s popcorn involved.
As a reader, I find the types of thrillers I enjoy most are those that replicate the experience of watching a really chilling film. Give me seamless storytelling, jump scares, atmosphere—the creepier, the better—and an overall sense of place that allows me to visualize every scene like it’s on a film strip in my head.
Because I will always choose a book over a movie (unless there’s a new Jurassic Park feature on the way), here’s a list of five thrillers so vivid and immersive you might forget you’re not at the multiplex.
No One Will Miss Her by Kat Rosenfield
I discovered this thriller around the same time that it was nominated for an Edgar Award (the Oscars of the thriller and mystery world). No One Will Miss Her opens on an October day in Maine with a scene so intense that I immediately read it twice. From there, the story – about a hardscrabble town pariah, a social media influence who lives an opulent life in a city several hours away, and the murder that teases out their shocking connection – alternates between rural and urban settings, both of which are gorgeously drawn.
5 Cinematic Thrillers to Rival Movie Night: A Guest Post by Tessa Wegert
Invisible City by Julia Dahl
In New York City, the murder of a Hasidic woman draws the attention of journalist Rebekah Roberts, who has ties to Brooklyn’s Orthodox community herself. In Julia Dahl’s debut, New York in winter emerges from the subway steam like a character in itself. Everywhere you travel with Rebekah as she investigates the homicide, you’ll see the city’s “steel sky” and feel the biting wind, and readers won’t soon forget the scrap yard along the canal where the victim was found, its excavators “frozen against the sky” with “thin scraps of metal hanging from their teeth.” This one will give you goosebumps.
5 Cinematic Thrillers to Rival Movie Night: A Guest Post by Tessa Wegert
Hello, Transcriber by Hannah Morrissey
“I know this place. The trees with their wet, charred-looking trunks; the smell of fish scales and soil; the coal-blackened bridge that looks like the exoskeleton from some prehistoric beetle, stretching from bank to bank.”
The fictional town of Black Harbor, Wisconsin couldn’t be a bleaker place. In her debut thriller, Hannah Morrissey plunges readers into protagonist Hazel Greenlee’s frozen, gritty world where she works as a police transcriber recording all manner of crimes, some of which hit close to home. Morrissey’s lush prose makes it impossible not to picture Black Harbor and its residents, many of whom are just as run-down as their gloomy city.
5 Cinematic Thrillers to Rival Movie Night: A Guest Post by Tessa Wegert
The Mountains Wild by Sarah Stewart Taylor
Straddling mystery and thriller genres, Sarah Stewart Taylor’s series debut paints not one but three settings in brilliant color: the Long Island town where detective Maggie D’arcy lives, the bustling streets and pubs of Dublin, and the wooded Wicklow Mountains and valley of Glenmalure, Ireland. “Cinematic” is the perfect term to describe this novel, which transports readers from the civilized world deep into the wilderness as protagonist Maggie works to solve the cold case of her long-missing cousin, who disappeared in Ireland more than two decades ago.
5 Cinematic Thrillers to Rival Movie Night: A Guest Post by Tessa Wegert
Bad Apples by Will Dean
Part of the excellent Tuva Moodyson series, Bad Apples takes readers to Visberg, a fictional Swedish village that hosts an annual apple harvest festival with shades of the occult. As newspaper editor Tuva investigates the brutal murder of a local, she must breach the insular community’s border walls and navigate the fallen rotting apples and strangeness she finds there, from nightmare-inducing troll dolls to savage rituals. Fans of horror movies and dark fairytales will devour this original thriller, which still haunts me today.
***
Tessa Wegert, who “remains a writer to watch” (Publishers Weekly), is the author of the popular Shana Merchant novels, which include Death in the Family, The Dead Season, Dead Wind, and The Kind to Kill, coming December 2022. A former digital media strategist and freelance journalist, Tessa has contributed to such publications as Forbes, The Huffington Post, The Economist, and The Globe and Mail. Raised in Quebec, she now lives with her husband and children in Connecticut, where she studies martial arts and is co-president of Sisters in Crime CT.
5 Cinematic Thrillers to Rival Movie Night: A Guest Post by Tessa Wegert
