Closed-door affairs. Manipulative protagonists. Eerie disappearances. Gruesome murders.
These are the unsettling hallmarks of a Lisa Jewell novel, but not of the woman behind the books. The “None of This is True” author may write some of the darkest stories on your bookshelf, but unlike her characters, she’s notoriously optimistic and a “terrible liar,” she says.
It’s surprising, given how sinister her books are. Jewell has a cult following of thriller readers, writing some of the genre’s best twist endings. But her sunny outlook on life is exactly why she loves writing psychological thrillers. She loves to get inside the head of someone completely different from her, she tells USA TODAY.
Jewell pitched her first novel, “Ralph's Party,” as a psychological thriller, but, being young and in love in London, it manifested as a romance. Through her next few pastel-book-covered romances, readers kept remarking how surprisingly dark the material was.
“I was really pushing a little bit against the genre, not wanting it to be too saccharine and too feel good and too sweet. I was tucking quite a lot of dark stuff away in those books,” Jewell says. “Then I got older, my career changed, my editor changed and I just sort of thought, ‘OK, it's time, I think, to start killing people.’”
