If the way Helen Clarvoe’s world narrows—those menacing calls from “Evelyn Merrick,” the sealed-off hotel room, and the final realization about who’s been orchestrating the terror—hooked you, you’ll love Jackson’s eerie portrait of Merricat Blackwood. Like Helen, Merricat controls the story from an insulated vantage, and the truth about the family’s past slips out in unnerving fragments. The same creeping dread and unreliable sense of what’s real that powered Beast in View pulses through We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

You enjoyed how the investigation—Paul Blackshear chasing the source of Helen’s harassment—flipped once the true nature of “Evelyn Merrick” came into focus. Gone Girl unleashes a similarly surgical reversal: Amy’s vanishing and the breadcrumb trail that looks one way at first, then detonates your assumptions. Like Millar’s precision with misleading signals (those phone calls, the staged encounters), Flynn builds a puzzle that rewards every suspicious detail with a stunning payoff.

If what stayed with you from Beast in View was the chilling portrait of Helen’s isolation and the way her fixations spiral into manipulation and violence, Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley offers that same close-quarters intimacy with a dangerous mind. Watching Tom Ripley rationalize impersonations and murders echoes the unsettling interiority behind Helen/Evelyn’s machinations—less about whodunit than how a psyche justifies the next step.

Like the tight focus in Beast in View—Helen in her hotel, Blackshear pacing through cramped offices and apartments while the menace closes in—Armstrong traps you in a few rooms with a volatile babysitter and an unsuspecting child over one harrowing evening. The intimacy of the setting heightens every whisper and footstep, delivering the same breathless, closed-in suspense that made the phone calls in Millar’s novel feel so near.

If you were drawn to the stark, almost clinical chill of Beast in View—the lonely corridors around Helen Clarvoe, the corrosive shame and obsession behind “Evelyn Merrick,” and Blackshear’s grim discoveries—Rendell’s A Demon in My View mines the same darkness. It follows an isolated man whose secret violent urges fester in a dingy building, turning everyday spaces into sites of dread. The tone is as unsparing and unsettling as Millar’s, with psychological menace taking center stage.