The best books about eerie islands

The plot is deceptively simple – eight strangers are invited to a mansion on a remote English island before the weather moves in and they start getting murdered one by one – but it’s a masterclass in gothic suspense and incredibly clever plotting. I first read it as a child at my grandparents’ house in Edinburgh, and it’s the first time I can remember reading a book and consciously thinking I want to do that. I want to write something just as clever and fascinating and brilliant. I still think it’s her best book, and its setting and atmosphere and structure have had a huge influence on my own writing and books. 

Islands in fiction are often remote and isolated, their inhabitants cut off from any outside help and having to rely upon only themselves for survival or escape. A U.S. Marshal goes to an island to investigate the disappearance of a murderous patient from a hospital for the criminally insane, in another terrifyingly clever book chock full of twists and turns. I’m drawn to stories that are gothic and hugely atmospheric and mysterious, and this book has all of that and more. Lehane described it as “a hybrid of the works of the Brontë sisters and Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and I can’t think of a better way to describe it! I’m always trying to wrongfoot and surprise a reader with shock reveals that they hopefully don’t see coming – I definitely did not see the end of Shutter Island coming at all! 

Islands are very much microcosms of the world, but they can be quite insular. Almost exempt from the rules of wider society. I first read Lord of the Flies in school – often a bit of a scary island in itself – and I read it in the way you drive past a horrific car crash: you don’t want to look because you know something awful has happened and is still happening, but you can’t help it. I was not popular in high school, and really identified with poor Simon and Piggy; the story is so frightening because it’s so plausible. 

The book is seen as a metaphor for individual freedom versus civilization; power versus subservience; what we will be prepared to do just to survive. I’ve always been fascinated by people: what makes them tick and what makes them break; the truly wonderful and terrible things that we are capable of under duress, and this book definitely played a big part in igniting that fascination.   

I have read and loved all of Ann Cleeves’ books about Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, set on the Scottish Shetland Islands. Red Bones is about two feuding families with generations of secrets between them, who are somehow involved in at least two murders. Islands, particularly those that are small and/or remote, foster communities that are incredibly tight-knit by necessity – often your survival entirely depends on one another. That has always made me wonder what lengths such communities might go to in order to survive; what secrets they might have to keep, what lies they might have to tell if something terrible happens that could jeopardise their whole existence. My time living on the Isle of Lewis in the Scottish Outer Hebrides very much inspired The Blackhouse, but it was in no small part also inspired by the wild Shetland Islands as described in Cleeves’ wonderful stories. 

This island is a beautiful paradise that quickly becomes sinister when the surviving victims of a plane crash have to survive each other. It’s a thriller with shades of Lord of the Flies, and it has a dual narrative which I love and often use in my own stories. It also explores the ever-changing bond between sisters, something that again I personally find endlessly fascinating and wrote about in my first novel. The Castaways is an incredibly propulsive read as you try to find out the truth – an island thriller in its truest sense.