Gaslighting: Writing post-truth in the domestic psychological suspense novel

The so called ‘post-truth’ era has spawned and reappropriated terms such as ‘gaslighting’, ‘fact-checking’ and ‘fake news’ where a bricolage of lies replaces scientific methods of enquiry and knowledge. Crime novelists have harnessed this destabilisation of 'truth' in their writing too: crime novels are essentially concerned with deception and the masking of truth. Gaslighting in particular is a specific type of post-truth psychological manipulation, where a false reality or propaganda net is constructed around a person or group of people in order to conceal essential knowledge. Psychological crime novels can effectively interrogate this phenomenon through plots that obscure the ‘truth’ of underlying events from readers, and via characters who mask the truth by creating false narratives and hermetically sealed ‘realities’ around other characters in order to conceal their crimes. Based loosely on a 1938 play and 1944 film Gaslight, my novel Don’t tell situates the phenomenon of gaslighting in a modern domestic psychological suspense novel where a husband apparently manipulates his wife’s sense of reality, and it is her task to unravel, with assistance from a therapist and detective, this perceived false reality. The gaslighting however is extended beyond the domestic realm, and the novel destabilises other truth-seeking or fact-checking methods (such as police detection and psychotherapy), creating an ambiguous text. Don’t tell is a ‘book of lies’ which examines how meta-narratives destabilise truth-telling activity and demonstrates how gaslighting operates through plot layering and complex character persona development.