Here are 100 books that Sleep No More fans have personally recommended if you like
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For years, I have been a voracious reader of dark psychological thrillers and psychological horror. I read several books every week, and I’m always overjoyed to be knocked sideways by an ingenious twist in a book. As a doctor, I am captivated by people and fascinated by the depths of the human mind. For me, humans are the scariest monsters of them all. In 2020, I decided to have a pop at writing a jaw-dropper myself, and my book was born. I only hope you don’t see that twist coming!
I am partial to a soupçon of the paranormal in my psychological thriller, which I know isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I was gripped the whole time reading, but although I knew something shocking was coming, I had absolutely no idea what was going on until the final chapters.
The reveal at the end genuinely left me shaking. It is probably my favorite twist of all time. Outstanding.
Don't Trust This Book
Don't Trust These People
Don't Trust Yourself
And whatever you do, DON'T give away that ending...
Louise
Since her husband walked out, Louise has made her son her world, supporting them both with her part-time job. But all that changes when she meets...
David
Young, successful and charming - Louise cannot believe a man like him would look at her twice let alone be attracted to her. But that all comes to a grinding halt when she meets his wife...
Adele
Beautiful, elegant and sweet - Louise's new friend seems perfect in every way. As she…
Thrillers are just that—thrilling. But thrillers with lots of explosions and gunfights aren’t that appealing to me since I know the hero will make it. With realistic domestic, at-home-style thrillers, the thrilling nature is how the scenarios could really happen. Those are the most thrilling ideas, the ones I can see how they could actually happen to someone—or to me. That makes it exciting. This is why I read many of them and have written quite a few, too, because there’s nothing more thrilling than thinking your home, or the people in it, isn’t as safe as you thought.
One of the best books I’ve ever read. The story’s puzzle is terrific, and the action is constant, intense, and entirely plausible.
This novel was one of the reasons I fell in love with the thriller genre, thanks to its continuous redirection and explosive revelations sprinkled throughout. Completely devourable.
If there was ever a novel I wish I could read again for the first time to be shocked all over again, this is unquestionably the one.
Every year, the Doctor David Beck and his young wife, Elizabeth, meet at the same deserted lake to rediscover their love for each other, and inscribe one more year into 'their' tree. But that year was the last. Elizabeth was kidnapped and Beck knocked unconscious. By the time he woke up, his wife had been discovered dead, and horribly mutilated. For eight years he grieves. Then one afternoon, he receives an anonymous e-mail telling him to log on to a certain web-site at a certain time, using a code that only the two of them knew. The screen opens onto…
When I was 27, I thought it would be fun to write. I have no formal training, yet I have found success through reading exposure and trial and error for 30 years. Changing my voice was hard, but reading these books helped me define the kind of story I wanted to tell in my new novel, Missed Connection. Erotic thrillers truly are a guilty pleasure for me.
Witty writing is important to me both as a writer and a reader, and Palahniuk’s prose is sharp, aggressive, and biting, with more wit than most writers know what to do with. It’s a hard feat as a writer to be witty and aggressive and still maintain the flow of the story, and Palahniuk does it over and over, with this book being a stand out for me.
Not too many books can make me laugh out loud, shudder, cringe, and keep turning the pages like this one did.
Misty Wilmot has had it. Once a promising young artist, she’s now stuck on an island ruined by tourism, drinking too much and working as a waitress in a hotel. Her husband, a contractor, is in a coma after a suicide attempt, but that doesn’t stop his clients from threatening Misty with lawsuits over a series of vile messages they’ve found on the walls of houses he remodeled.
Suddenly, though, Misty finds her artistic talent returning as she begins a period of compulsive painting. Inspired but confused by this burst of creativity, she soon finds herself a pawn in a…
From USA Today bestselling author Peggy Webb comes a page-turning thriller.
It’s midnight in the Deep South where innocence and evil walk hand in hand. Every waking moment Jena Dahl re-lives the day the plane went down, plunging her husband and her little girl to their deaths. She was on…
When I was about 8 years old, I read a book called Tom and the Two Handles by Russell Hoban. It’s a children’s book designed to teach that every story has two sides. This book stuck with me for some reason. So, when I started writing novels, I always made sure my villains had pure motives. Remember, no well-written bad guy THINKS he’s a bad guy. He thinks he’s doing the right thing. This is true of all the classic Bond villains right up to Thanos in the MCU. Plus, and I’m sure most writers would agree, the bad guys are always more fun to write.
This is another book that I discovered after seeing the TV show. The Netflix adaptation is fairly faithful to the text, but I still really enjoyed the novel because the writing is witty, clever, and beautifully paced in a way that makes you want to keep reading when you know you should turn out the light and go to sleep.
The little character quirks add realism and some much-needed light relief to a pretty dark story. For me, the scariest thing about this book is, even though our lead character goes to extreme lengths most of us would never even consider, the roots of his actions come from thoughts we’ve probably all had.
*** NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX SERIES *** 'Thriller of the Year' Daily Mail 'Hypnotic and scary' Stephen King 'Examines the fine line between seduction and stalking . . . Ludicrously readable' Guardian
When aspiring writer Guinevere Beck strides into the bookstore where Joe works, he is instantly smitten.
But there's more to Joe than Beck realises and much more to Beck than her perfect facade. And the obsessive relationship quickly spirals into a whirlwind of deadly consequences...
A chilling account of unrelenting, terrifying deceit, Caroline Kepnes' You is a thriller more perversely clever and dangerously twisted than any YOU have…
I’m a therapist and Jungian analyst who has been writing and speaking about the transgender phenomenon since 2016. Across the Anglosphere, teen girls have begun identifying as transgender in significant numbers since around 2011. Many are quickly accessing medical interventions. When I became aware of these trends, I got curious about them. I’m especially fascinated by the way that social and psychological factors can shape our understanding of mental health and mental illness, and I’ve been exploring these topics as they relate to trans adolescents. I’ve worked with trans-identifying young people and their parents, as well as detransitioners.
I loved this book because it addressed what I think is at the heart of much of our mental health crisis – that the stories that we tell ourselves can shape our mental health.
As a therapist, I know intuitively that how we think about our distress can shape the course that our illness takes. Does the story promote resilience and flexibility? Or does it fragilize us and lead to worse mental health?
Aviv tells compelling stories from a number of cultures that helped me explore these important questions further.
The highly anticipated debut from the award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv is a ground-breaking exploration of illness and the mind
Strangers to Ourselves is a compassionate, courageous and riveting look at the ways we talk about and understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on unpublished journals and letters, along with deep reporting, it follows people who feel as if they have reached the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. Their diagnosis, while giving their experiences a name, also shapes their sense of what their future may look like-and their identities, too.
I am one of those people who always feels sorry for the monster at the end of the movie. I am always more disturbed by the avenging townspeople’s bloodlust than the monster’s destructiveness. At a deeper level, for me these horror stories actually depict compassion, acceptance, and the hysteria whipped up by self-righteous mobs. They are books with very dark themes, and they generally do not have happy endings, but rather than being depressing, I find them instructive, even enriching, and certainly valuable. More than anything, they show me – in bloody detail – the terrifying limits of conformity.
Similar in vein, a more opaque story than Frankenstein, and with a more indeterminate morality surrounding the main character, who is, after all, a crackpot murderer, but eliciting perhaps the same complex reactions toward him and the other characters at the book’s tragic ending.
Meet Tony Valenti. His high-flying corporate law career just cratered. His society marriage blew up in a bitter divorce. He's returned to the Chicago suburbs to lick his wounds and regroup in the haven of the Valenti family home. But time to heal isn't in the cards.
I have a reputation as an expert on the portrayal of psychopathology in contemporary cinema, and I have lectured on this topic hundreds of times in dozens of different countries. This reputation builds on five editions of Movies and Mental Illness and two editions of Positive Psychology at the Movies. I am also currently coauthoring a third book: Movies, Mini-series, and Multiculturalism: Using Films to Understand Culture, and I edit a series of film reviews for Hogrefe titled A Clinical Psychologist Goes to the Movies. Much of my career has been devoted to exploring the fascinating interface of psychopathology and media.
I found this book perfect for my dual interests in mental illness and cinema; it is current (copyright 2023) and engaging. Charney is a practicing child psychiatry who brings extensive clinical experience to his writing. He also loves films, and this comes across in this book.
I especially like the numerous film grabs that illustrate this interesting volume, and it was especially interesting to see another therapist’s reactions to dozens of films I have watched and loved.
A unique exploration of how mental illness is portrayed in classic and contemporary films.
The study of classic and contemporary films can provide a powerful avenue to understand the experience of mental illness. In Madness at the Movies, James Charney, MD, a practicing psychiatrist and long-time cinephile, examines films that delve deeply into characters' inner worlds, and he analyzes moments that help define their particular mental illness.
Based on the highly popular course that Charney taught at Yale University and the American University of Rome, Madness at the Movies introduces readers to films that may be new to them and…
My literary interest began in childhood when my love for rhyme encouraged me to write limericks and poems. In 2009, my first novel, An Ordinary Life was published, which I considered to be a therapeutic exercise to see where it would lead, and here I am, much wiser, but still learning. Becoming an author has greatly enhanced my appreciation of the written word and how powerful it can be, hence, my book choices – a personal literary journey.
This book inspired me as an author and how to write with conviction.
The mental health element of the story was totally relatable, being a former worker in such a setting. I understood the hostility surrounding schizophrenia and the thoughts and feelings of the main character, a young boy who had the condition.
Skewed thinking and phobias can be isolating, where the sufferer can feel truly alone and this is the overwhelming sense throughout.
'A darkly quirky story of love, obsession and fear . . . a beautiful story hung around the enchanting and heartbreaking voice of teenager Greg' Anna James
Miss Hayes has a new theory. She thinks my condition's caused by some traumatic incident from my past I keep deep-rooted in my mind. As soon as I come clean I'll flood out all these tears and it'll all be ok and I won't be scared of Them anymore.
The truth is I can't think of any single traumatic childhood incident to tell her. I mean, there are plenty of bad…
I’ve spent the last decade researching and writing about mental illness and how it manifests in different cultures. My research has led me to archives in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, where I’ve uncovered documents from the earliest Chinese-managed asylums and psychopathic hospitals – documents that give rare glimpses into what it was like to have been mentally ill in China at the turn of the twentieth century. My book, The Invention of Madness, is the first monographic study of mental illness in China in the modern period.
This classic account by a renowned sociologist is critical reading for those interested in the anti-psychiatry movement, a crusade that viewed psychiatry as more coercive than therapeutic and, in some cases, questioned the reality of mental illness itself. For one year, Goffman embedded himself in St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington, DC, where he ultimately concluded that the defining features of the asylum – similar to those of prisons and other “total institutions” – did more to shape the patient’s behavior than the supposed illness for which the patient had been admitted in the first place. Goffman’s observations left a significant impact on popular ideas about asylum care and helped contribute to widespread deinstitutionalization several decades later.
Asylums is an analysis of life in "total institutions"--closed worlds like prisons, army camps, boarding schools, nursing homes and mental hospitals. It focuses on the relationship between the inmate and the institution, how the setting affects the person and how the person can deal with life on the inside.
I’d been writing for forty years before I could write about the biggest story in my life. My 25 non-fiction books about the American West—landscape, Native peoples, conservation—are a joy to research, photograph, and create. But I had unfinished emotional business: my mentally ill brother who left home when I was six, never to return. After everyone in my family was gone, it was finally safe. I began to recreate my brother’s life, reveling in research. I know how to do that. Opening myself emotionally to the heart of my family story took far longer. Empathy is a choice, and I’ve made my choice.
In many ways, my book is a prologue to Robert Kolker’s extraordinary book. When Mike left our home, he moved to the Colorado State Hospital, in 1957, just a few years before the Galvin brothers began to rotate through the same wards. My mother dealt with the guilt and shame, stigma and chaos of one child with schizophrenia. The Galvins had ten boys and two girls, and six of the boys were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Unimaginable. I feel especially close to their story because I went to college in Colorado Springs. I rode my bike near the Galvin home on Hidden Valley Road. Even the brain research ending Kolker’s book on a note of hope happens in Denver at the University of Colorado. Like mine, this is a Colorado story.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF GQ's TOP 50 BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY • The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.
"Reads like a medical detective journey and sheds light on a topic so many of us face: mental illness." —Oprah Winfrey
Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado,…