Trigger is not a book that tiptoes around its subject matter. It dives straight into the wreckage of memory, trauma, and the fragile trust we place in family. Jennifer Stockdale crafts a chilling and heartbreaking psychological thriller that asks what if the people who are supposed to protect you are also the ones rewriting your truth?
Told across two timelines, 1976 and 1982 - 1983, the story follows Dora Culligan, the youngest of five and the only girl in a wealthy, tightly controlled New England family. With four older brothers, Dora knows her place in the pecking order. Sometimes she is the tattletale, sometimes the baby who gets away with everything, and sometimes the one whose memories do not quite match what everyone else insists happened. But when one of her brothers, Tommy, dies by suicide, the family’s perfect façade fractures. Secrets start stacking up, each one heavier than the last, until the weight of them becomes suffocating. Years later, a song triggers a memory, and Dora begins to pull at the threads of a carefully constructed story, one her family has gone to great lengths to protect.
Trigger is raw and unnerving, exploring themes of suicide, family trauma, gaslighting, denial, lies, and the corrosive power of love twisted by control. Stockdale writes with precision and empathy, unspooling the tension slowly, allowing readers to feel Dora’s growing disorientation and dread. The alternating timelines build a steady rhythm of unease, and the sense of claustrophobia, emotional and physical, is relentless in the best possible way. This is a story about what we choose to remember, what we are forced to forget, and the haunting possibility that sometimes our minds are not the problem, our families are.
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