In addition to her eerie psychological thriller, The Therapist’s Daughter, Megan Taylor’s dark novels include We Wait, her take on a traditional haunted house mystery, and she’s also had many short stories published, some of which are included in her collection, The Woman Under the Ground. Taylor lives in Nottingham, UK, where she’s working on her next twisted thriller and a second collection.
At CrimeReads she tagged seven crime novels "steeped in the kind of eerie atmosphere that threatens to unsettle your perceptions and infect your dreams." One title on the list:
Sarah Waters, AffinityRead about the other entries on the list at CrimeReads.
It was tricky to decide which wonderful Waters novel to choose. The Little Stranger, which begins as a traditional hauntedhouse story and, layer by layer, becomes something creepily else, was tempting, but I’m going with Affinity because, for all its overtly gothic tropes, it’s concerned with crime and conspiracy from the outset.
Margaret Prior is a volunteer visitor at Millbank prison when she meets disgraced spiritualist Selena Dawes, convicted for her role in an unexplained death at a séance. With her trademark twists and reveals, Waters deftly delivers the noirish story of the affinity between these two women, but what lingers is the novel’s darkness. Dread slithers through love and longing as queasily as the crawling fingers of Selena’s spirit guide’s waxy hand.
Affinity is among M. M. DeLuca's five great books that feature mediums & the spirit world.
--Marshal Zeringue
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