Abbott plunges into youth sports

What would a 15-year-old with Olympic dreams do to make an elite gymnastics team?

What would parents who have mortgaged their lives in pursuit of this ambition do to help her?

With her ninth novel, “You Will Know Me,” Megan Abbott returns again to the dangerous world of teenage girls, and like her cheerleading murder mystery, “Dare Me,” this one is set in the sweaty enclaves of female athletic contest. Abbott has explained in an interview that the idea for the current plot grew out of a viral video of a mom and dad so completely possessed by anxiety on the sidelines of a gymnastics meet that they unconsciously mimic their daughter’s moves on the bar.

But that was funny.

Short, staccato sentences like the preceding provide the equivalent of eerie soundtrack music in Abbott’s novels. Her rendition of the everyday remark is like the close-up of a yellow pencil lying on a table in a horror movie, making the most mundane things feel terrifying. Most scenes end with short, innocuous comments, often in dialogue, that hang ominously in the air that follows: “Right. Whatever you say.” “Everyone’s counting on me.” “He’s not himself.” “I’m sorry. You surprised me.”

Soon enough, you’re like those parents at the gymnastic meet, riveted.

What puts flesh on the bones of Abbott’s flying cheetah of suspense is her insight into parenting, marriage and various sorts of interpersonal rivalry, here embodied in Katie and Eric Knox, their hugely talented daughter, Devon, their sweet younger son, Drew — so neglected that he has to come down with scarlet fever to get any attention — and the other parents and children in their gymnastics club.

For example, on the parenting theme, Katie learns to her chagrin in an early chapter that the jokes she shares with her daughter about Devon’s mutilated “Frankenfoot,” shaped into what has turned out to be a gymnastics claw by a lawn mower accident when she was a toddler, have not been so well received. “Even Mom thought her foot made her look like a monster.”

You don’t need an Olympic hopeful in the family to concur. Katie and Eric’s marriage will resonate with some readers too, those whose fraying connections and dubious long-term compatibility are sustained by undimmed bedroom chemistry — until one day they are not.

The characters of the adult women in this book, none completely likable, are knowingly depicted. Katie, the ice-queen mother of the star; Gwen, whose daughter has little talent but whose fortune fuels the booster club; Molly, who takes any excuse to throw her arms around Katie’s attractive husband and press her “quivering breasts” against his chest.

Complexity is what lifts Abbott above other writers in this genre, making her something of a Stephen King, whose work hangs right on the edge of the literary while making your skin crawl.