Six classic thrillers featuring the most human of monsters

Steven L. Kent and Nicholas Kaufmann are the authors of the bestselling horror novel 100 Fathoms Below.

At CrimeReads they tagged six favorite literary human monsters, including:

Amy Dunne: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

We all know a “perfect couple,” two people who go together so well that you can’t imagine them with anyone else. They’re both attractive, they both lead interesting lives that never leave them at a loss for fascinating stories to tell over dinner, and their love and devotion to each other is evident in everything they say and do.

Or maybe that’s just what they want you to think. After all, Amy and Nick Dunne appear to be the perfect couple from the outside, but on the inside Amy is hatching a twisted, manipulative plot against him. She hates that Nick forced her to move from her beloved New York City to North Carthage, Missouri so he can be near his sick mother, and to punish him she fakes her disappearance and leaves clues framing Nick for her murder. It only gets more tangled from there, encompassing everything from a fictitious diary to a faked pregnancy to outright murder.

The perfect couple? Not exactly, but by the time we learn just how selfish and manipulative Nick is as well, we realize these two definitely deserve each other.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Gone Girl made Elizabeth Macneal's list of five sympathetic fictional psychopaths, Jo Jakeman's top ten list of revenge novels, Amanda Craig's list of favorite books about modern married life, Sarah Pinborough's top ten list of unreliable narrators, C.A. Higgins's top five list of books with plot twists that flip your perception, Ruth Ware's top ten list of psychological thrillers, Jane Alexander's top ten list of treasure hunts in fiction, Fanny Blake's list of five top books about revenge, Monique Alice's list of six great fictional evil geniuses, Jeff Somers's lists of the top five best worst couples in literature, six books that’ll make you glad you’re single and five books with an outstanding standalone scene that can be read on its own, Lucie Whitehouse's ten top list of psychological suspense novels with marriages at their heart and Kathryn Williams's list of eight of fiction’s craziest unreliable narrators.

--Marshal Zeringue