Story for the Week
My obsession with psychological thrillers started early…probably because there’s a lot of crossover with horror. What’s more horrifying than something that makes you question your own mind? I think this also drove me to a fascination with psychology. I took a basic psychology class in high school just for kicks, and I knew I would major in journalism in college. But I also chose to minor in psychology…again, just because it fascinates me.
I grew up reading things like Flowers in the Attic, The Shining, Misery—stories that can really mess with your head. And we watched movies like Fatal Attraction, which was so iconic that Tom Hanks’ character references it in the romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle. In Sleepless, Sam Baldwin is the widowed father of eight-year-old Jonah, who wants his dad to find a new wife because he’s always so sad. Jonah latches onto the idea of Sam flying to New York to meet Annie, a complete stranger who sends in a letter after hearing Sam on a radio show.
Sam: “I am NOT going to New York to meet some woman who could be a crazy, sick lunatic! Didn’t you see Fatal Attraction?”
Jonah: “You wouldn’t let me!”
Sam: “Well, I saw it, and it scared the shit out of me! It scared the shit out of every man in America!”
Recently, I suggested to Corinne that we should watch Fatal Attraction. This came after she, her friend Jakub, and I went to see Obsession at the theater. When we bought the tickets, we didn’t really know anything about the movie. Categorized as supernatural psychological horror, Obsession tells the story of a man who wishes that the woman he likes would love him more than anyone in the world.
Corinne had seen videos talking about people leaving the theater halfway through because of the tension and graphic violence. And the toxic nature of the relationship between the two main characters exemplifies the idea of “be careful what you wish for.” We watched the trailer, and it looked fantastic.
Nearly halfway through the movie, however, not much had happened. Bear, the main character, works with Nikki, Ian, and Sarah at a music store. Bear desperately wants to be with Nikki, but asking her out for a drink seems to terrify him. When Nikki drops her crystal necklace down the sink while she and Bear talk on the phone, he stops at a store to buy her a new one. He ends up buying a novelty gift—a One Wish Willow, which the store clerk jokes that a lot of people try to return.
He tells Nikki that he has something for her, but then he chickens out and doesn’t give it to her. In an act of seeming desperation, he breaks the willow branch and wishes that Nikki would love him “more than anyone in the f***ing world.” You can see where this is going. It’s called Obsession, after all.
Here is where the movie fell down for me. Thrillers need to BE thrilling. Psychological horror needs to keep you on the edge of your seat, waiting for the next scare. A thriller, in my humble opinion, should start fast and just keep amping up the tension. There is no room for comic relief in a thriller. In a drama…yes. In a tragic love story…sure. But I don’t want that relief in a psychological thriller. When the action doesn’t start until the movie is half over, I just get bored. And I did.
The day after Obsession, we saw Backrooms with Corinne’s friend Alicja, based on a web series about an interdimensional space of seemingly endless hallways and rooms. In the movie, a furniture store owner discovers the space through a wall in the basement of the store and becomes obsessed with exploring it. Alicja spent a lot of the movie hugging her legs with her face covered. Corinne jumped from the scares more than once—the first time probably only about five minutes into the movie.
When the movie ended, Corinne said that she understood what I meant the night before about the tension continuing to increase over the course of the movie. Because Backrooms did not have a single moment where I relaxed. The music, the lighting, the way the characters acted…all of it played into the suspense. I walked out saying that I would 100% pay to see it again.
The book reviewed below is not classified as a psychological thriller per se. But there is very much a psychological aspect to it. I definitely found myself wanting to get through to the next chapter to find out what happens. A dual timeline also draws the reader back to what happens in the other timeline as you read. Those types of timelines can be very effective in creating suspense. But my favorite parts of the book centered around the psychology and the information provided about the studies from the 1960s…because psychology fascinates me.
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐½
3.5 Stars for The Women in White by Sarah Pekkanen
304 pages
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: August 4, 2026
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press.
Publisher’s Description
Extrasensory perception.
The Gift.
A Sixth Sense.
Or something else….
In 1964, four remarkable young women at a prestigious university became the subjects of parapsychology experiments by a visionary scientist. On the cusp of a historic breakthrough, the women mysteriously vanished and the program was erased from history.
Decades later, Riley Bell, newly divorced and desperate for a fresh start, accepts a caretaker job for an elderly widow named Betty. Riley steps into a home that is frozen in another era—no microwave, television, or cell phones, and Betty has never heard of the internet.
Why has Betty lived in such profound isolation for so many years, and why does she need Riley now? As the story unfolds across two timelines—Betty’s 1960s era of 5 o’clock martinis and high-stakes experiments, and Riley’s quest to uncover the truth about the missing women—old secrets rise to the surface. And the only way to survive is to confront the mystery that has lingered for sixty years.
************
Main Characters:
- Dr. Silas Trimble (1964) – runs the Trimble Institute inside the Department of Psychology building at Marquis University, testing psychic capabilities, believes that certain abilities exist naturally in a small subset of the population, looking for a chosen few recruits with innate psychic ability
- Douglas Sadler (1964) – Ph.D. student working with Dr. Trimble, discovers Betty’s psychic capabilities and recruits her to participate in Dr. Trimble’s research
- Betty Sadler (1964) – 19-year-old student at Marquis University, recently married to Douglas, recruited for a parapsychology study with Dr. Trimble
- Kathleen Moore (1964) – flight attendant, raised by a single mother, very conscious of appearances and taking care of her husband Ronald, recruited for the parapsychology study
- Ivy Lennox (1964) – married to David who was hired as a football coach at Marquis, pregnant with their first child, recruited for the parapsychology study
- Helen Hopkins (1964) – 18 years old, youngest of the four women, lives with her widowed mother, works in the Necco factory
- Betty Sadler (current day) – 81 years old, recently widowed, confined to a wheelchair, lives in a home that hasn’t changed a bit since the 1960s without any modern conveniences
- Riley Bell (current day) – 32 years old, recently divorced and sleeping in her car because her husband’s secret gambling addiction caused them to lose everything, works as a nurse’s aid at a hospital, applies for a live-in caretaker position with Betty
- Sandra Lennox (current day) – 62 years old, Ivy and David’s daughter, works as a therapist who specializes in mental health disorders and acute grief, lives in Virginia near the Marquis campus
- Alex Finch (current day) – a current student at Marquis University, slept with her married psychology professor, he said she made it up because he accused her of cheating on one of her papers
- Sam Trimble (current day) – Dr. Trimble’s grandson, obsessed with his grandfather’s research, runs a group called Seekers Collective to discuss parapsychology topics
As a psychology buff and a huge fan of Sarah Pekkanen’s novels, both with and without Greer Hendricks, I expected to love this title. I have read several of their titles in the past and rated all of them 4 or 5 stars. This one falls just a little short.
Using multiple timelines, Pekkanen tells the story of Betty Sadler’s experiences in a research study at Marquis University.
In 1964, Betty’s husband Douglas works toward his Ph.D. under Dr. Silas Trimble and helps him find four women for his research. Douglas is thrilled to discover that his own wife qualifies as “Girl Four.” As the research progresses, Dr. Trimble demands increasingly more of the women’s time. Douglas and the other husbands grow less patient with their wives’ absence and inability to put dinner on the table and drinks in their hands.
In the present day, Betty seems stuck in 1964. Recently widowed and having spent her life in a wheelchair after an accident, she needs an in-home caregiver. She hires Riley, who finds it shocking that Betty doesn’t own any modern conveniences and knows nothing about the Internet.
When Betty asks Riley to look for her friends from the Institute, we learn more about what really happened during Dr. Trimble’s research.
Most people know that research in the 1960s didn’t fall under regulations like today. It could be cruel. People could be tortured all in the name of science. Pekkanen does a great job of highlighting the traditional gender roles of the time. The wives talk about ensuring dinner is ready when their husbands arrive home. They have drinks at the ready. The author also effectively reminds us that no one understood the dangers of smoking and drinking on a pregnancy. The women smoke regularly and even talk about how a drink will help Ivy relax.
I appreciated the setup and actually thought the alternating timelines worked well for the most part. Some chapters went back earlier than 1964, and we learn how each woman first experienced her ability. And the 1964 chapters drive what Riley looks for in the present day. I don’t want to give a whole lot away, but I figured out a key plot point pretty early. I expect those types of things to be better disguised.
I also feel like the back story with Riley’s ex-husband was unnecessary. While we need the context for why Riley sleeps in her car, things happen that aren’t relevant to the story. And something happens at the end that I really didn’t like. Again, I don’t want to give it away, but something Riley does disappoints at the end of the book.
Finally, Pekkanen weaves in real-world clips of published studies and articles for each chapter set in the past. When we first meet Betty in 1964, the chapter begins with “The investigation of extra-sensory perception at Duke University…has come to include well over ninety thousand trials. – Dr. J.B. Rhine, Ph.D., head of the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory.”
In an Appendix, Pekkanen includes more detail of the clips at the beginning of those chapters, and I wish I had known about them before I started the book. Better yet, I wish they had been included with each chapter in their entirety. They aren’t long, so I found it unnecessary to include partial text in the chapter with the full text in the Appendix. I kept flipping back and forth to look at what the pieces in the Appendix tied to in the story. It annoyed me after a while, and I just stopped reading them. When I finished the book itself, I read them without the context of each chapter.
For example, Chapter 40 begins: “Between the ages of two and three, [Ravi] kept asking for toys which he claimed he had in the house of his previous life and said he himself had been murdered, giving names and details…. In a different district a six-year-old boy, was murdered…. His father’s name and the details of his murder correspond with the account of Ravi Shankar. – Journal of Parapsychology”
In the Appendix: “When between the ages of two and three, [Ravi] kept asking for toys which he claimed he had in the house of his previous life and said he himself had been murdered, giving names and details. His mother said that at three or four months she noticed a mark on his neck resembling a scar from a knife wound…. In January 1951, in a different district, Munna—a six-year-old boy, was murdered with a knife or razor. His father’s name and the details of his murder correspond with the account of Ravi Shankar. – Source: An article in the Journal of Parapsychology, Volume 30, Published in 1966”
Not much of a difference.
All in all, Pekkanen created a solid story here with a truly psychological back story…just not my favorite.
If you enjoyed this post, please comment below. Subscribe for regular updates, and share it with your friends. If you’re interested in starting a conversation, send an email to booksundertheblanket@gmail.com.
As an Amazon affiliate, I earn a small commission at no cost to you when you make a purchase using the links on my site.
