The Good Samaritan

John Marrs’s The Good Samaritan is a quintessential psychological thriller, a subgenre that prioritizes interior conflict and mental torment over physical action to generate suspense. Unlike traditional thrillers focused on external threats, this genre delves into the mental turmoil of its characters, often blurring the lines between protagonist and antagonist. This is most evident in the novel’s use of dual unreliable narrators, a convention popularized by contemporary thrillers like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Marrs’s narrative alternates between Laura, the manipulative helpline volunteer, and Ryan, the grieving husband seeking vengeance. This structure creates significant dramatic irony and tension, as the reader is aware of Laura’s villainy long before Ryan is, but the contrast between her cold, calculated manipulation and Ryan’s raw, grief-driven quest also creates a morally ambiguous landscape where the traditional hero-villain dynamic is destabilized. Ryan’s increasingly obsessive and manipulative tactics in his pursuit of Laura begin to mirror her own, raising questions about whether his quest for justice is fundamentally different from her desire for control and developing the theme of The Blurred Line Between Victim and Perpetrator.

Laura’s narration in particular pushes several of the conventions of the psychological thriller genre to an extreme. Her unreliability is clear from the first chapters; she presents herself as a benevolent “saviour of lost souls” while meticulously documenting her methods for pushing vulnerable people toward suicide (35). Her perspective forces the reader into an uncomfortable complicity, challenging them to understand the logic of a predator. Over the course of the novel, however, it emerges that her unreliability goes much deeper, resulting in an escalating series of plot twists: Tony’s separation from Laura, “David’s” real identity and the truth of Laura’s time in foster care, and, finally, the story of the house fire that resulted in Henry’s disability. The true horror of the novel, characteristic of the genre, lies not in the deaths it depicts but in the psychological chess match between two individuals with a profound ability to lie even to themselves.