Top 5 Book Narrators You Shouldn't Trust but Can't Stop Listening To
Unreliable narrators so charming, wounded or slippery that you only realize you were played after you've finished the last page.
-
Stevens — The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
He lies to you mostly by lying to himself, and watching his polite composure crack is the most quietly devastating thing in modern fiction.
-
Dr. Sheppard — The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Agatha Christie)
Christie broke the rules of the detective novel so cleanly that readers in 1926 complained it was cheating. It wasn't. They just weren't paying attention.
-
Amy Dunne — Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn)
Her diary chapters are so likable that the turn at the midpoint feels like being personally conned, which is exactly the point.
-
Merricat Blackwood — We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)
She's whimsical, superstitious and deeply unsettling all at once, and Jackson makes you sort of want to move into that house with her anyway.
-
Humbert Humbert — Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
The gorgeous prose is the trap. It's the ultimate test of whether you can admire the sentences while seeing straight through the monster writing them.