The Unreliable Narrator: How to Heighten Suspense and Keep Readers Guessing in Psychological Thrillers

By Carol Willis

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One of the most powerful tools in a psychological thriller is the unreliable narrator—a character whose perception, memory, or understanding of reality is compromised. This technique pulls readers deep into the mind of the protagonist while simultaneously keeping them at a distance, sowing doubt and suspicion. When done well, it heightens tension and fuels page-turning suspense.

In psychological thrillers, the unreliable narrator isn't just a stylistic choice—it's a structural engine. First-person narration lets readers experience the character’s inner turmoil, but what happens when that narrator cannot be trusted? Whether the cause is head trauma, substance abuse, mental illness, or sheer denial, the effect is the same: uncertainty. 

And uncertainty is the lifeblood of suspense.

What Makes a Narrator Unreliable?

Unreliable narrators are those whose version of the story is distorted by deception, delusion, or impairment. Some lie deliberately; others mislead unintentionally due to mental illness or altered states of consciousness. In psychological thrillers, the latter are especially compelling. These narrators believe what they say and yet the reader comes to understand that what they believe may not be true.

Let’s take a closer look at how several authors, Annie Ward in Beautiful Bad (2018), Tana French in The Witch Elm (2018), and Imran Mahmood in I Know What I Saw (20210) use head trauma, addiction, and psychological instability to create deeply unreliable perspectives that drive suspense and emotional tension.

Head Trauma as a Narrative Device

Set in the American Midwest, Annie Ward’s Beautiful Bad is a tightly constructed domestic psychological thriller centered on Maddie, a devoted wife and mother, her war-scarred husband, and their young son. As is typical of the genre, nothing is as it seems: buried secrets and simmering tension culminate in a shocking murder. During a camping trip, Maddie suffers a traumatic brain injury that leaves her memory fragmented. Much of the novel hinges on her attempts to piece together what really happened. Ward structures the story through short, staccato chapters and a nonlinear timeline that mirror Maddie’s cognitive disorientation. She also weaves in her husband’s PTSD and alcoholism, which amplify the emotional instability and deepen the atmosphere of dread. Readers are drawn into a fog of partial memories and unreliable perceptions, forced to navigate Maddie’s fractured psyche in search of the truth.

Tana French’s standalone psychological suspense, The Witch Elm offers a more introspective, character-driven psychological thriller, where trauma fractures not only memory but identity. Toby, a privileged and affable young man, survives a brutal home invasion that leaves him with a severe head injury and a lingering sense of cognitive instability. As he retreats to his family’s ancestral home to recover, a skull is discovered in the garden, triggering both a police investigation and a deeper unraveling within Toby himself. French masterfully entwines the external mystery with the internal one: who was Toby before the attack, and can he trust the person he is now? The narrative blurs the line between guilt and innocence, perception and denial. Toby’s unreliable memory becomes the novel’s engine of suspense, compelling readers to question not only what happened, but whether Toby himself might be capable of violence he can no longer remember.

Imran Mahmood’s I Know What I Saw (2021) offers another powerful example of how head trauma can fracture both memory and identity. The narrator, Xander Shute, is a once-successful barrister now living on the streets of London. When he accidentally witnesses a murder in what he believes is a break-in gone wrong, he reports it only to be told by police that no such crime occurred, and the apartment is occupied by a completely different couple. What follows is a tense unraveling of Xander’s mind. His past trauma, mental health struggles, and head injuries blur the line between what he remembers and what may have never happened at all. Mahmood uses fragmented memories, dreamlike logic, and time slippage to keep the reader guessing: Is Xander witnessing a conspiracy, or is he caught in the spiraling aftermath of untreated trauma? His voice is sharp, intelligent, and self-aware. Yet the more he insists on what he saw, the more readers question whether they should believe him.

Other Forms of Unreliability

Substance abuse is another common and highly effective device in thrillers. Alcoholism and drug addiction introduce uncertainty, distortion, and mistrust—the perfect ingredients for narrative suspense. These altered states skew perception, bend time, and create memory gaps that leave both the character and the reader struggling to connect the dots. In Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train (2015), for example, blackouts erase entire chunks of the protagonist’s experience. The narrator becomes both detective and suspect, trying to solve a mystery she might have unwittingly caused.

Mental illness—especially dissociation, anxiety, and PTSD—can also destabilize a narrator’s grasp on reality. A character may be telling the truth as they see it, but that version of events is filtered through trauma, fear, or delusion. These internal fractures not only add emotional complexity but also keep readers questioning what’s real, and what’s imagined.

Why It Works

Unreliable narrators heighten suspense by withholding clarity. In a genre driven by twists and revelations, these characters provide fertile ground for ambiguity. The reader doesn’t simply ask, "What will happen?" but, more compellingly, "What is really going on?"

Unlike thrillers that rely solely on external threats, psychological thrillers with unreliable narrators turn the narrative inward. They make the protagonist’s mind the true battleground. The suspense comes not only from what the character might do, but from whether they even know what they are capable of.

For Writers: Using Unreliability to Build Suspense

Start with character: What might your protagonist be unwilling or unable to see clearly? Consider layering trauma, denial, or dependence on substances to introduce narrative distortion.

Use memory loss or selective recall to reveal truths in increments. Structure scenes around flashbacks, contradictions, or moments where the narrator second-guesses themselves. Let your setting mirror the character’s instability—fog, rain, locked rooms, or chaotic domestic spaces can reinforce psychological disarray.

And most importantly, root the unreliability in emotional truth. Readers don’t need to trust your narrator to follow them—they just need to believe in their struggle. Suspense thrives in this space between belief and doubt.

Truth Meter for Murder: The Interview

By Stephanie Dickinson

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"In real-world situations, it's very difficult to know what the truth is.”

Israeli psychologist Gershon Ben-Shahar

At the heart of Razor Wire Wilderness, my soon-to-launch true crime memoir, stands Krystal Riordan, then a 20-year-old prostitute who witnessed a horrific murder, and now a 35-year-old inmate. In July 2006, at the end of a hot, steamy night, her 36-year-old pimp/boyfriend Draymond Coleman brought Jennifer Moore, a teenage girl stranded after a night of underage drinking, to the seedy Weehawken, New Jersey hotel room that the two shared. Krystal saw her boyfriend punch Jennifer when she refused his sexual advances, and then continued to watch the escalating violence, the beating, the strangling, and the rape. Was she a willing accomplice, or was she too a victim? Draymond Coleman pled guilty to first degree murder and received a 50-year sentence. His release date: January 23, 2049. Krystal pled guilty to kidnapping and hindering apprehension and received a 30-year sentence. Her release date: October 25, 2027. 

Now, almost 15 years later, the question remains unanswered. Perpetrator or victim? Was she a willing accomplice, or was she too a victim? Or was she both accomplice and victim? Perhaps it’s not the right question or series of questions. Draymond Coleman refuses to be interviewed, although he occasionally writes Krystal: You never turned your back on me. You’re where you are because of my stupidity. And then, most disconcerting: Even after our arrest, your letters were always–I love you, I love you, I love you… What truth lies behind those words? Or the following from Krystal: I froze. I thought I would be next. Does truth smell like sweat and Clorox? He snapped, and then he snapped back. The sweat of the murderer and the Clorox used to wipe DNA from the body. I froze. 

Finding the truth for the writer is ultimately not the same as the truth-seeking done by the police or by a prosecuting attorney; the writer is looking for a more nuanced truth, something that works toward explaining the inexplicable. Often, those who know the perpetrator, the character witnesses, are interviewed not to corroborate evidence but to shift the focus, to introduce us to the variegated person they know, to render a fuller, more intimate picture. Draymond babysat for my daughter. He was a big teddy bear. For more substantiation, the police reports are scrutinized. Police look for certainty in either the circumstantial evidence or a confession that will lead to a conviction. Writers want to know what lies behind the corroborated, adjudicated truth. The interior, the unadorned, the bone truth. 

How are we to interview an inmate about the crime they were sentenced for? Must they exonerate themselves to themselves? Are they running through a mental checklist of what and who they have revealed the truth to? It matters less how we interview the subject, whether in person or via video/audio or email, than providing a safe emotional space that puts our subject at ease. Krystal, my subject, is an eyewitness as well as a perpetrator. She underwent 14 hours of initial interrogation. Eyewitness testimony often leads not to truth but to misidentification and falsehood. The Innocence Project points out that inaccurate eyewitness testimony is the leading cause of false convictions. We are running up against the notorious tricks of memory. Perhaps the telling and re-telling opens the door to creating false memories. 

“Can we believe that she was remorseful? Not after viewing the video. She left the room at will numerous times.” 

–Candida Moore, Victim Impact Statement

The grainy hotel video captures Krystal leaving the murder room on numerous occasions. I always did what he told me to do. I was weak-minded. No one who witnessed the crime is independent. The video camera turns out to be the most credible witness, free of bias and emotion. The truth meter grapples with I saw it with own eyes. Human memory is porous, the holes plugged with filler. Experts tell us we can’t possibly take in all the minutia around us, so the brain fills in the details. 

Trauma degrades the clarity of memory. I was mugged inside my building, and afterward, I rode with the police through the neighborhood, looking for the perpetrators. I had described two men, the taller one wearing a red sweatshirt. On the police radio, we learned that two men had been apprehended after another mugging, minutes after mine had occurred, and were being held on Greenwich Avenue by the arresting officers. The taller man stood under the streetlights, and I saw he wore a brown jacket, not a red sweatshirt. Instead, he had on red sweatpants. The chrome handgun tossed into the bushes linked the men to a series of muggings, including mine. Why had I been so sure of the red sweatshirt? The men had pushed me down in the stairwell, and I was at eye level with the red sweatpants. I saw red. But what if someone’s future depended wholly on the accuracy of that red sweatshirt?

The interview, including the self-interview, has always fascinated me in its many hybrid forms. I conducted a fictional interview with a noir actress from the 1960s in my book Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg. (New Michigan Press). Seemingly chronological, the questions evolved into something more circular, i.e., the actress interrogating herself and colliding with the existential question of whether or not you can even know your own truth. My friend Andrew Kaufman’s poetry collection The Rwanda Poems will soon appear, and since he had conducted extensive face-to-face interviews in Rwanda with a number of genocide survivors, rape victims, perpetrators falsely accused, and perpetrators convicted of horrifically murderous acts, I asked him about his technique. Considering he spoke to both victims and perpetrators, was the testimony itself the sought-after truth? The speech? Did his approach differ when it came to perpetrators? He approached both initially the same in a kind of getting-acquainted approach, asking about the subject’s childhood, family, life experiences, school, work, and favorite activities. Then, in the case of perpetrators, the questions would narrow, becoming more pointed and specific. 

Perhaps we should all try interviewing exercises, a self-interview, we become our own mock lie detectors. We can look at memory not as something fixed but a fluidity, often a matter of perception. 

In reviewing my first letters to Krystal, I discovered that my technique and Andrew’s initially followed a similar path. Tell me about yourself: What is your favorite color? Do you like animals? What kind of music do you listen to? What are your favorite foods? I then told her all my favorites. 

Later, I could ask:

Q: I know you and Draymond have a child together. Do you have any contact with the child? 

Q: Did having a child with him make it difficult for you to testify against him?

Much later:

Q:  Could Jennifer have left the room alive if she had stopped resisting Draymond?

A:  Jennifer was no match for Draymond.

Q: Did Jennifer walk into the room willingly, or did Draymond carry her in?

A: Jennifer was doing cocaine.

I questioned the validity of both answers. In Jennifer’s last cell phone call to her boyfriend, she states, “A man keeps following me, and he’s offering me drugs.” What I don’t question in Krystal’s answers are the deeper truths about her inner world that her few words reveal. In the beginning, I could not fathom how a young woman who had the ability to leave the murder room would not run for help. Now I understand I do not condone or excuse, and it is not my place to forgive. Through interviews, I know Krystal both as perpetrator and victim. Never did she consider testifying against her ex-boyfriend, the now-convicted murderer. Although Draymond Coleman has promised on numerous occasions to give his statement to exonerate Krystal, he never has.

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Stephanie Dickinson, raised on an Iowa farm, now lives in New York City with the poet Rob Cook and their senior citizen feline, Vallejo. Her novels “Half Girl” and “Lust Series” are published by Spuyten Duyvil, as is her feminist noir “Love Highway.” Other books include “Heat: An Interview with Jean Seberg” (New Michigan Press); “Flashlight Girls Run” (New Meridian Arts Press); “The Emily Fables” (ELJ Press); and “Big-Headed Anna Imagines Herself” (Alien Buddha). She has published poetry and prose in literary journals including Cherry Tree, The Bitter Oleander, Mudfish, Another Chicago Magazine, Lit, The Chattahoochee Review, The Columbia Review, Orca and Gargoyle, among others. Her stories have been reprinted in New Stories from the South, New Stories from the Midwest, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She received distinguished story citations in Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays and numerous Pushcart anthology citations. In 2020, she won the Bitter Oleander Poetry Book Prize with her “Blue Swan/Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries.” To support the holy flow, she has long labored as a word processor for a Fifth Avenue accounting firm.