Shiny happy people give Caroline the creeps

Long before Cape Cod-raised Caroline Kepnes became a best-selling novelist, she wrote a spec script for an episode of the 1990s/2000s feel-good family show “7th Heaven.”

Kepnes had long been fascinated with the series about a minister and his family because it was so pure. Too pure.

“I was always obsessed with it because it’s so clean that it’s creepy,” Kepnes said. “There’s a line in my first book, ‘You’re so clean, you’re dirty.’ That’s how I always felt about ‘7th Heaven.’ ”