Rosemary's Baby is one of my favorite horror films of all time because of its brilliantly rendered and seething buildup of anxiety and paranoia.
Bedbugs conjures a similar psychological terror — with the added creep factor of demonic insects, which made me itch just reading about them. The book not only plays on our fear of creepy-crawlies, but it brings up the persistent distrust of a woman's mental faculties, as well as that chilling fear of the pervasiveness of evil.
Written by New York Times writer Ben H. Winters, Bedbugs introduces us to Susan and Alex Wendt, a young, yupster NYC family who's attractive, charming, witty and nearly perfect; too unconventional to be suburbanites but too stable to live on the fringe. Winters familiarizes us with his characters lovingly with nuance.
