Mistress of Vibes: Your Quick Guide to Megan Abbott Novels

Our guest-poster introduces us to the oeuvre of Left Coast Crime's Guest of Honor

From Andromeda: I will be in Seattle mixing with crime writers and readers April 11-14—please let me know in the comments if you’ll be at the Left Coast Crime Conference! And given that Megan Abbott will be honored, I asked for a guest post from one of her fans. My friend and fellow writer, Shannon Kelley, complied. Take it away, Shannon!

When the lovely Andromeda—a member of one of my writing groups and author of several novels, most excitingly the soon-to-be-released thriller THE DEEPEST LAKE (more about that one coming soon, but you can preorder it now!)—asked me if I’d write about Megan Abbott in a piece to crosspost on both of our Substacks, I did not hesitate.

Abbott is a total auto-buy for me. I don't have to know anything about a new book, I just trust that her stories will carry me along, deep into the dark underbelly of some world—cheerleading, gymnastics, ballet, an elite chemistry lab—I'd never considered before.

Source: Giphy.com

Abbott’s background (she's a scholar of noir and early Hollywood) and early work in more "classic" noir lends a distinct fingerprint to her novels. There's that moodiness, sense of claustrophobia, the disruptive interloper, the illicit sex, the ubiquitous undercurrent of dread. In a word: VIBES!

But then on top of that, she layers such perceptive insights about womanhood (and girlhood): the interior worlds where all those things that are forbidden and provocative go to stew. Competition, desire, dreams, rage, eroticism, enmeshment, jealousy—it's all there, as are all the ways an attempt to deny them will cause them to metastasize into something far more dangerous.

And while she deals in high-concept plot—this is a crime/suspense/thriller (genres are hard!) writer we’re talking about here—her stories hum with deeper, more universal female concerns. I read a couple of her earlier works ahead of writing this, and it’s fascinating to see the way they have evolved—tracking late girlhood through junior high and high school and on into womanhood.

THE END OF EVERYTHING wrangles with the power and danger girls are forced to reckon with as their bodies start their abandonment of childhood and how desires that aren’t fully understood can lead to the kind of disaster they’d never considered, while DARE ME and THE FEVER see girls, a few years older and shrewder but girls still, playing with that power, sometimes to horrible effect.

A trifecta of the Abbott oeuvre—YOU WILL KNOW ME, DARE ME and THE TURNOUT—are set in the ubercompetitive worlds of elite sports (gymnastics, cheerleading, and ballet, respectively). Sports that are extremely gendered in their understanding, and in which girls and women must be extremely powerful, driven, and competitive to find any kind of success… but who must appear young, feminine and painfully dainty while they’re at it. (Cue the Barbie monologue!)

GIVE ME YOUR HAND takes on the murky territory where friendships turn toxic, competitive, and twisted, even among grown women.

And in her latest, BEWARE THE WOMAN, on its surface a creepy cabin psychological thriller, we see a woman who realizes that her pregnancy has rendered her nothing more than a vessel, to be used and then disposed of.

If it all feels a little too close to home, that’s by design. While her thrillers can shock, the motivations of her characters, their inner worlds and the nuances of their relationships never do—they're all too relatable, which is likely what makes her work so very thrilling indeed.

A Pushcart Prize nominee, Shannon Kelley spent a decade as a writer/editor at the Santa Barbara Independent, and her work has appeared in Elle, The Washington Post, Vogue, Aeon and others. When not busy momming, running, or working her day job at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, she can be found cooking, reading, or putting the finishing touches on her debut novel.

Shannon’s Substack is called

Thanks, Shannon! Now it’s your turn, readers. Tell us your favorite Megan Abbott book and why you enjoyed it, or if you’re newer to her, which one you hope to read soon. And if you’re going to LCC, shout it out here!