The best thrillers that are also literary novels

I was unprepared for the surreal brilliance of this book. The novel initially appears to be a work of nonfiction written to deconstruct The Navidson Record, a documentary film that describes an unusual residence in Virginia. This house, owned by Will Navidson and his wife Karen Green, appears to be larger inside than outside. This sounds impossible, of course, but that’s what makes this book so wonderful. No matter how impossible the subject matter may seem, Danielewski’s approach renders even the craziest supernatural plot elements as if they were happening in everyday life. And in this case, everyday life is a waking nightmare.

What I love about this book (and all the books on this list) is it marries a high-concept plot with complex characters struggling with the same real-world problems all of us do. Another main character, Johnny Truant, discovers the manuscript and becomes obsessed with its story. Through research, he learns there was never a film called The Navidson Record, and the ostensible author of the nonfiction manuscript (who recently passed away) was blind. Truant uses footnotes and extratextual elements to comment on the manuscript, like Charles Kinbote in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and eventually, the story becomes as much about him as the Navidsons or the original author of the manuscript.

And I haven’t even scratched the surface of this complex, impressive novel! I wish I could experience it again for the first time.

This book is a literary novel set in part on the Moon. That’s not a sentence you’ll read often, which is a big part of why I love this novel—it’s not what I expected, even though there’s a big hint in the title.

Like many readers, my introduction to Emily St. John Mandel was her post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven. In that story, the most interesting characters aren’t concerned with simple survival…if they are going to fight to live, they want a culture worth fighting for. When I picked this book up, I deliberately chose not to read the story summary and was completely caught off guard by how the novel unfolded. Typically, stories questioning time and our perception of reality do so by sending the protagonist on a dangerous quest looking for answers.

Like all my favorite novels, the scope is intimate and vast in this one. The story takes place during years ranging from 1912 to 2401 and wraps by connecting the various characters and their time periods, a structure that echoes David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Through each character’s eyes, we see their personal concerns and learn something essential about humanity. This is a quiet and beautiful “thriller.”

This book is probably the most out-of-place of the five novels on this list. Where the others make their high-concept elements obvious early, the author chooses a different route in this one.

Like so many of his novels, Bret Easton Ellis opens his story with shallow and vapid characters behaving in absurd ways and uttering dialogue so outrageous I wondered if the entire enterprise was a joke. But despite the hilarious parody of substance-free celebrity and the inane repetition of idiotic phrases like “baby,” this story ultimately has more to say than, ahem, less than zero. It’s a takedown of capitalism and a bankrupt culture, so biting it would make Philip K Dick proud.

The second half of the novel, in fact, reads like PKD himself.

I loved this one because it read like the kind of post-apocalyptic fiction Stephen King might have written—a sprawling novel of civilizational fall with a huge cast of characters on an enormous canvas that nonetheless tells intimate stories. Yes, it’s technically a vampire novel and a pandemic novel, but unlike other stories in the genre (though I’m not sure this book belongs to a genre), it brings empathy. A heart. Because maybe the virals (the word “vampire” rarely appears in the text) aren’t evil but sick, which could be considered a metaphor for addiction, poverty, or any maligned social group.

The first part of the book takes place in the current day and describes the origins of the virus and the rapid fall of the civilization that follows. In contrast, the second picks up the story 90 years later when only a few tenuous colonies of uninfected humans remain. These colonies weren’t designed to survive forever, and eventually, a few adventurous citizens were forced to leave the relative safety of their colony. I’m sure you can imagine what happens next.

This book is an immensely readable, intelligent, exciting novel—one of my all-time favorites.

I love this book for its Matroyska doll-style structure: The first five sections tell stories in different periods— from the mid-19th century to the 22nd—loosely connected by repeating characters and media, each ending abruptly and without resolution. The sixth section, set in the 24th century, is the spine of the novel, told in its entirety. Then Mitchell revisits the time periods in reverse chronological order, resolving each story, ending where we began in the mid-19th century.

It was a highly satisfying experience that changed my view of how a story could be told. It is widely considered one of the finest novels of the 21st century. It covers ideas I would normally balk at, like reincarnation and the existence of eternal consciousness. Still, the storytelling is so powerful that it all came across as believable to me. I loved the way Mitchell demonstrated how an idea in one time period can become a belief system in the next.

The film version is decent, but reading the novel is an experience like no other. Give it a try!