Six top social thrillers that will make you wonder who you can trust

Anna Barrington has worked in galleries and auction houses in the art world for over five years. She received an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art and a BA from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Originally from Atlanta, she currently lives in London, where she worked at a leading international art gallery.

The Spectacle is her first novel.

At CrimeReads Barrington tagged "six novels to remind us that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you." One title on the list:

Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin

Rosemary’s Baby gains its strength from the superficially girlish, clipped realism of Ira Levin’s deadpan prose. We see 1960s New York through the eyes of Rosemary, a hopeful young housewife who has just married the actor Guy. When a stroke of luck delivers them a beautiful apartment in the legendary Bramford building, the couple meets a bunch of elderly neighbors who cook them dinner, offer ideas for Guy’s stilted career, and eagerly encourage her to get pregnant. But something satanic is growing inside Rosemary. Levin allows us to make up our own mind slowly about Rosemary’s husband, obstetrician and neighbors, who surround her with cheery advice even as she becomes more isolated, sick and scared. The novel has a feminist subtext; I found myself horrified at how Rosemary allows her peers to assuage her fears with their ‘rational’ and ‘medical’ advice, dismissing her own gut instinct that something is powerfully wrong.

Read about another novel on the list.

Rosemary's Baby is among Chin-Sun Lee's five best gothic novels about distressed women, Lisa Unger's five top horror novels that explore the darkest corners of our minds, Alice Blanchard's ten chilling thrillers to get you through a winter storm, Ania Ahlborn's ten scariest books of all time, Jeff Somers's twenty-one books that will give you an idea of how the horror genre has evolved and "twenty-five books that might not necessarily be the best horror novels, but are certainly the scariest," Christopher Shultz's top ten literary chillers, and Kat Rosenfield's top seven scary autumnal stories.

--Marshal Zeringue