Chris Barker

The Psychopath Next Door seems to have drifted to the top of my Kindle recommendations despite its generic title.*

The book opens with Fiona, a clinical psychopath straight out of The Mask of Sanity**, being released from prison. Eager for revenge for a past wrong, she moves to a quiet neighbourhood to make her mysterious plans.

Fiona’s new house happens to be next door to Ethan Dove, a seemingly normal record store owner, his wife, with whom he has a tense relationship, and their two children, one of whom has begun exhibiting callous, even psychopathic, behaviour. Ethan and his wife’s aim is simply to avoid trouble and manage their daughter’s problem. Wouldn’t you know it, Fiona becomes interested in her neighbours and takes their child under her wing, with frightening results.

Realistically exploring psychopathy is a great idea for a novel, particularly because the book includes a few different examples, allowing it to show a spectrum of behaviour. Real-life psychopaths lack empathy and are impulsive and manipulative, and the best chapters are the ones which put us in Fiona’s POV and show us how calculating, scheming and apparently soulless she can be.

Where The Psychopath Next Door fails is in its lack of realism. Most psychopaths are more dangerous to themselves than others: they often commit crimes, but their inability to plan means they aren’t exactly Hannibal Lecter. They are more likely to go to jail for fights, alcoholism and dangerous driving than to become murderers.

The Psychopath Next Door falls apart when the extent of Fiona’s criminality is revealed. She is not just a serial killer but part of a network of similar deviants across the world, who recruit and ‘mentor’ children with dark triad personality traits. Just for something to do, of course, since they don’t care about other people.

The other characters don’t stand out. Ethan is just a little too boring, and none of the others gain a third dimension. Suspension of disbelief goes out of the window in the second half as Fiona’s body count rises and her backstory becomes more convoluted. There is a last-minute twist which does make Fiona more sympathetic, but too late to save the book.

The Psychopath Next Door is frustrating because Fiona initially seems like a complex portrayal of a mentally ill, but quite frightening, person, but she devolves into a generic thriller villain about halfway through.

*There are two films with the same name, and I swear there was a similar non-fiction book as well.

** Hervey M. Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity, the book which codified the original idea of psychopaths. An interesting and disturbing read.