The Stranger in My Bed is a domestic psychological thriller revolving around married couple Freya and Paul. As the result of a bad car accident, Paul has lost his memories from the past 2 years - his and Freya's entire married life. The last thing he remembers is them coming back from their honeymoon. Paul thinks he and Freya must have a great marriage since, as far as he remembers, they were head over heels in love with each other. Freya, however, knows the truth of the past two years. Living every day afraid of Paul's sudden bursts of anger and him lashing out at her for the smallest reasons. With his memories gone, Paul is the man Freya fell in love with and the question she must ask herself is: should she give him another chance?
The first thing I want to mention is a trigger warning for domestic violence. There are multiple scenes, both in the present story as well as in flashbacks, where the domestic violence is on the page and we are experiencing it right alongside Freya. It ranges from emotional, verbal, to physical abuse. I've never been in a domestic violence situation, but I didn't find the scenes to be overly gratuitous with the descriptions. I didn't get the feeling that the scenes were included for shock value or anything like that. The scenes really built up the tension in the story and were the cause of a lot of the internal tension in Freya. From what I know from reading other real-accounts from domestic abuse survivors is that the infractions often start out small, and the perpetrator of the violence will then shower the other person with apologies, love, promises to never do it again - all of which are included in this book. The book is split perspective mostly between Freya and Paul and the violence scenes were all from Freya's point of view so I never felt sympathy for Paul because we didn't hear his internal rationalizations for why he was doing these things to Freya. And when Paul was apologizing to Freya, we could hear her internal thoughts about how conflicted she was about accepting his apology. I think this book is a very powerful look at the cycle of domestic violence and how it can affect relationships of all kinds. I really wanted to mention this right at the beginning because the description of the book really doesn't do justice, I feel, to how much on the page abuse the reader will encounter.
I think the strongest part of this novel was, by far, the writing. It was very clean and concise which is exactly how I like my thriller prose to be. The split POV was also really well handled, each character had their own voice and there were some times where I would be reading along, a new chapter would start, and I wouldn't pay attention to whose perspective we were in but I could tell within a few sentences. I thought the additional POVs that we get sprinkled in throughout the book were also well done and they helped fill in some narrative gaps in the story in an easy and non-convoluted way. The descriptions given of both people and places were just descriptive enough that I could get a picture in my mind without King going on and on for paragraphs at a time. After re-reading a few passages, I think King does an excellent job of picking out key, grounding details to give to the reader and then she let's us fill in the finer details on our own.
The biggest let down of the book for me was the thriller aspects, which was a bummer considering this was labeled a domestic psychological thriller which are normally home runs for me. Now maybe people who haven't read as many thrillers as I have wouldn't have these issues with the book, and since all of this will be vague as to avoid spoilers, maybe take my opinions with a grain of salt. So, first of all, it wasn't that the thriller aspects were bad or mishandled. Quite the opposite, in fact, I will say I didn't see the final twist coming (I did call the earlier ones though) and the tension and sense of danger that Freya was in was very well crafted and kept me flipping pages as fast as I could. However, I found the overall thriller aspects to be very surface level and if King had just turned up the dial a bit, I think this book could have been fantastic. To start, I've read a few amnesia thrillers where the woman in the story is the one who lost her memories and she has to spend the whole book getting them back, only to find that someone she trusted the whole time was actually lying to her. I thought that this book would be following that same sort of story line except it was the man who had lost his memory and it would be the woman's turn to get revenge or manipulate him in some way to her benefit since we know from the summary that their marriage is abusive. This was not what happened and I was bummed about it, but, again, not everyone will have those expectations if they didn't read those previous books. Also, there was some set up in Paul's POV for Freya to be an unreliable narrator as he questions her motives and what her true intentions are (which, if these thoughts had been paired with her actually manipulating him in revenge like I was expecting, would have been awesome). However, the reader never sees Freya as anything other than 100% trustworthy. We are immediately sympathetic to her situation and everyone in her life that we're introduced to supports her. She doesn't have any sort of mysterious past like we get with Paul so when Paul starts to question her motives, I basically immediately dismissed them and I never got a build up of tension trying to figure out who is right that I think the story was going for.
The ending of this story I found really great. Again, no spoilers, but any time the final twist in a thriller gets revealed and verbally react when I'm reading is a sign of an excellent twist. I especially liked the final twist because I had guessed that X happened, then X was dismissed in the narrative, but then the final twist was given and X turned out to be true, but not in the way I had initially thought. There also was a good amount of resolution time after the final confrontation, which I always appreciate.
Overall, a pretty decent surface level thriller with dual POV. Decent twist on the amnesia-thriller trope. Writing was great, very tight, and kept the tension high throughout the book. Trigger warning for on-page domestic violence.
295 pages.
Thanks to NetGalley and Bookouture for providing the ARC. This book will be published on November 23, 2020.
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