The Creepiest Families in Fiction

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From Crime Reads:

The contrast between what a family is supposed to be—comforting, supportive, affectionate, a place of safety and refuge—and the suffering that a warped family is capable of inflicting upon its members is the basis of many a successful and satisfying domestic thriller.  I’m fascinated by the thought that something malignant can be bubbling away under a perfectly ordinary façade. What could be more commonplace, or more potentially toxic, than family life?

As readers, we feel sharper sympathy for victims who suffer at the hands of a family member who is supposed to have their best interests at heart, and we feel heightened contempt for wrongdoers who, going against their structural roles as nurturers, defenders or allies, harm those closest to them. When they work, families are sanctuaries, but home can also be a place to hide behaviors that would not be tolerated in wider society; bullies can terrorize, and manipulators can control, coerce and constrain behind closed doors.

In my new psychological thriller Perfect Little Children (published in the UK as Haven’t They Grown), something is seriously wrong in the Braid Family. Here’s the blurb:

All Beth has to do is drive her son to his Under-16s away match, watch him play, and bring him home.

Just because she knows that her former best friend lives near the football ground, that doesn’t mean she has to drive past her house and try to catch a glimpse of her. Why would Beth do that, and risk dredging up painful memories? She hasn’t seen Flora Braid for twelve years. 

But she can’t resist. She parks outside Flora’s house and watches from across the road as Flora and her children, Thomas and Emily, step out of the car. Except…

There’s something terribly wrong. 

Flora looks the same, only older — just as Beth would have expected. It’s the children that are the problem. Twelve years ago, Thomas and Emily Braid were five and three years old. Today, they look precisely as they did then. They are still five and three. They are Thomas and Emily without a doubt — Beth hears Flora call them by their names — but they haven’t changed at all.

They are no taller, no older.

Why haven’t they grown?

. . . .

See Jane Run

The protagonist of this novel finds herself in a store, covered in blood, in possession of $10,000 and with no memory of who she is or how she came to be there. Her only chance of finding out the truth and getting her life back comes in the form of a stranger who says he’s her husband. There’s nothing scarier than a family that wants to claim you as its own when you have no way of knowing if you truly belong to it. This is a flawless and desperately gripping psychological thriller.

Link to the rest at Crime Reads