We are thrilled to sit down with Hilary Amanda, author of psychological thrillers that explore the darkness hiding beneath ordinary lives. Her stories delve into fear, trauma, buried secrets, moral ambiguity, and the unsettling question of what ordinary people are capable of when pushed beyond their limits. We had the opportunity to talk with Hilary about her approach to creating deeply complicated characters, building psychological suspense, and the ideas behind her upcoming novel, Silent Screams.

Thriller Magazine:  One of the most striking lines on your website is, “I don’t write monsters. I write ordinary people who become them.” What fascinates you about that transformation, and what do you think has to happen for an ordinary person to cross that line?

I think what fascinates me most is that I don’t believe there is always a clear line between an ordinary person and a monster. We like to think there is because it makes us feel safer. We look at someone who has done something terrible and tell ourselves they must be fundamentally different from us. But what happens when you start taking things away from an ordinary person? Their safety. Their identity. Someone they love. Their sense of control. How much fear, grief, betrayal, or desperation can a person absorb before something changes?

That question is much more frightening to me than a monster ever could be. I’m interested in the moment when someone does something they once believed themselves incapable of doing…and then has to live with the fact that they were capable of it after all. My characters don’t wake up evil. Usually, they can justify every step they take right up until they’ve gone somewhere they can’t come back from.

TM: Your novels seem deeply interested in the things people bury—fear, trauma, resentment, guilt, even the desire for revenge. When you’re developing a character, do you begin with the external thriller plot, or do you first ask what that person is hiding from the world—and from themselves?

Almost always the person first. I can have an idea for a twist or a situation, but the story doesn’t really become interesting to me until I know what the character doesn’t want anyone else to know. Sometimes even more important is what they refuse to admit to themselves.

I think secrets are most powerful when they aren’t simply pieces of information being withheld from the reader. They should affect how a character behaves, what they notice, what they avoid, who they trust, and the decisions they make. Then the external thriller grows naturally out of that internal conflict. I don’t want a twist to exist simply because it shocks the reader. I want the reader to reach the end, look backward, and realize the truth was influencing everything from the beginning.

TM: Psychological thrillers often have to walk a difficult line: you want readers to understand a damaged or traumatized character without necessarily excusing the choices that character makes. How do you approach writing morally complicated characters with empathy while still holding them accountable?

Understanding someone and excusing them are two completely different things, and I think psychological thrillers become much more interesting in that space between the two. I want readers to understand how a character got there. I want them to feel uncomfortable when they recognize the logic behind a terrible decision, because suddenly it isn’t as easy to separate themselves from that character.

But trauma isn’t a free pass. Pain can explain behavior without making that behavior acceptable. I try not to tell the reader exactly who deserves forgiveness or condemnation. I would rather give them enough of the character’s humanity to make that judgment difficult. Some of my favorite reactions are when two readers finish the same book and completely disagree about whether a character was a victim, a villain, or somehow both.

TM: Your next novel, Silent Screams, arrives in September. Without giving too much away, what fear, question, or idea sits at the heart of this book, and what makes it different from the psychological territory you explored in Truths We Bury and Whispers of Fate?

Silent Screams is currently in its final stages and coming soon, and at its heart is a question I keep returning to in different ways: what happens to a person when survival requires becoming someone they never thought they could be?

I have to be careful because this is absolutely a book where knowing too much would change the experience. What I can say is that Silent Screams goes into a darker and more claustrophobic psychological space than my previous books. Truths We Bury is very much about what we hide and what happens when those buried truths begin surfacing. Whispers of Fate explores darkness through a different kind of thriller lens. Silent Screams feels more immediate and visceral to me. It asks the reader not only what they think a character should do, but what they themselves might do under the same circumstances.

TM: You describe your stories as living in the “quiet spaces of ordinary lives.” Why do you think ordinary, familiar situations can sometimes be more frightening than traditional horror, and how do you turn that familiarity into suspense on the page?

Because we can dismiss a monster when we close the book. It probably isn’t waiting in our kitchen.

But the person sleeping beside you? The neighbor who waves every morning? The parent everyone thinks is wonderful? The stranger sitting three stools away at a diner? Those people exist. We interact with them every day, and we can never completely know what is happening inside another person’s mind.

I love taking something that initially feels safe and making one small thing wrong. Then another. I don’t necessarily want the reader to immediately know why they’re uncomfortable. I want that discomfort to accumulate until something completely ordinary—a conversation, a bedroom, a familiar face—feels threatening. For me, psychological suspense works best when the reader realizes the frightening thing wasn’t hiding in some distant, unfamiliar place. It was sitting right beside them the entire time.