Author Spotlight

Megan Abbott

Megan Abbott is the award-winning author of twelve crime novels, including the New York Times best seller The Turnout and her latest, Beware the Woman. Her new novel, El Dorado Drive, publishes in June 2025. Formerly a writer on HBO’s The Deuce, she also wrote and produced a show for Netflix based on her novel Dare Me.

5 Results
I’ll Be Your Mirror: Megan Abbott Talks with William Horberg About Ripley on Film

The acclaimed crime writer joins a producer of the 1999 adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley to discuss the cinematic incarnations of Patricia Highsmith’s shape-shifting, quintessentially American antihero.

By Megan Abbott

Peeping Tom: He Has His Father’s Eyes

Despite the harsh critical drubbing it received upon its release in 1960, Michael Powell’s lurid tale of obsession and violence is now widely regarded as a masterpiece—and as a key inspiration for an entire subgenre of “slasher” movies.

By Megan Abbott

Leave Her to Heaven: The Eyes of Ellen Berent

In this Technicolor film noir masterpiece, Gene Tierney stars as one of cinema’s most dangerous and sympathetic femmes fatales, a woman who finds it impossible to conform to postwar gender roles.

By Megan Abbott

The Virgin Suicides: “They Hadn’t Heard Us Calling”

Sofia Coppola lets us behind closed doors in ways that are beyond the imagining of the novel’s boy narrators.

By Megan Abbott

Picnic at Hanging Rock: What We See and What We Seem

Peter Weir’s sun-dappled, sexually charged nightmare about a disappearance in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australia still unnerves due to its radical lack of resolution.

By Megan Abbott