Pinborough is sanguine about the reactions. Amazon reviews give an insight into its Marmite quality, ranging from five stars and “a wicked ending”, to “a good story ruined by a preposterous ending”. Photograph: Josh Barratt/Netflixīehind Her Eyes has now sold almost 1m copies around the world, and the Netflix adaptation is set to propel sales further still. View image in fullscreen Cracks in their marriage … Tom Bateman and Eve Hewson. Everything had to have dual meaning, so that no one could say this character lied.

“At first I thought it was going to be really easy to write, but it was quite hard. “I wanted it to hit all the beats of a regular thriller. She tried infusing her story with “flavour” – then, suddenly, she had the twist. A friend had died that week, and I was looking after someone’s dog, who I had to have put down. “She said, ‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be brilliant.’ Which obviously means it has to be brilliant,’” Pinborough says. She went for a beer with an editor at HarperCollins, who told her she wasn’t being published right, and asked her to pitch a book. “I’d written, like, 20 books and never broken through.” It’s really dangerous to be envious of other people’s success, but I started to worry that maybe my shelf life was running out,” she says. She remembers sitting in a bar during the sci-fi convention Worldcon, “watching people, and seeing writers who had just got big deals. “But I couldn’t come up with anything original.” At that point, Pinborough had written a couple of dozen novels – a mix of horror, science fiction and fantasy – and won a handful of awards, but none had become bestsellers. I thought I’d quite fancy writing something like that,” she says. “I’d been reading a lot of books like Gone Girl, domestic noir and psychological thrillers, and I was really enjoying them. And though I’m personally a much more receptive audience for a wild sci-fi story than I am for an erotic thriller, I was far more absorbed by how the show handled the relationships at its core than its exploration of the more powerful forces at work underneath.View image in fullscreen ‘My brain was fried’… Sarah Pinborough. Most of it plays as if everyone involved just got bored with the original version of the story and decided to shake things up midway through. Behind Her Eyes, unfortunately, is too interested in shock value for its own sake, rather than making the pieces fit together. Adele promises to teach Louise a method of controlling her dreams, and as the women attack the problem together, Adele’s solution starts to border on the supernatural, until it tumbles headfirst in that direction.ĭone smartly, smuggling one genre inside of another can be exciting. Here is what I can say: Louise and Adele bond over the rather huge coincidence that both suffer from night terrors. This is perhaps good for people who only want surprise from entertainment much less good for those who want their entertainment to have some consistency of story or tone. It’s difficult to talk about without spoiling that WTF ending, though it is a situation where telling potential viewers there’s a huge twist - more than one, actually - will in no way prepare them to work it out ahead of schedule. Before Louise can stop herself, she has fallen into bed with David and become close friends with Adele, convinced she can maintain both relationships without anyone finding out.īut then? Well… then, Behind Her Eyes becomes a different kind of story altogether, and a much sillier one. He is, of course, married - and, worse, he is Louise’s new boss, David (Tom Bateman), new in town along with his glamorous, mentally ill wife Adele (Eve Hewson). On a lonely night out at a pub, she hits it off with a handsome stranger, but he runs off right when the evening is about to advance to the next step.

Louise (Simona Brown) is an English single mom who works part-time in a psychiatrist’s office. Adapted by Steve Lightfoot and Angela LaManna, the series starts off in familiar, secure territory as an erotic thriller about a love triangle. The shame of it is that Behind Her Eyes the TV show is actually pretty good, until it starts prizing wild twists above all else.

And I’m sorry to report that my reaction was the latter. I have not read Pinborough’s novel, and only learned of the hashtag after watching all six episodes of the new Netflix limited series version of Behind Her Eyes. Behind Her Eyes, a bestselling thriller written by Sarah Pinborough, was marketed with its own hashtag, #WTFThatEnding, that can be interpreted two ways: as a lure convincing potential readers that they’ll be delighted by an unexpected conclusion, or as a warning that they’ll want to hurl the book across the room upon finishing.

In her eyes netflix