Caroline
Kepnes
Joe Goldberg
meets Guinevere Beck in a cozy bookstore in the East Village and it is love at
first sight. For Joe. Sadly, he forgets
to ask for her number! Like any love sick person would do, he tracks her down
using her credit card information, and finds the perfect opportunity on her
Twitter feed to have a second ‘chance’ meeting to ask her out properly. While a bit of an extreme reaction to most,
this is a perfectly reasonable solution to Joe, a serial stalker.
Joe will
stop at nothing to insert himself into Beck’s life, even if it means removing
the people in her life who don’t spark joy. By adjusting Beck’s social circle
and watching her communication through her stolen phone, Joe worms his way into
her life without her realizing the true extent of his devotion. Joe is not the staid, upstanding (if a bit
boring), boyfriend she thinks him to be, but a deeply disturbed stalker,
obsessed with every aspect of Beck.
Told from
Joe’s perspective, this novel is somewhat unsettling. All his twisted rationale makes perfect sense
when read from his viewpoint. While you know as the reader that everything he
is thinking and doing are both criminal and deeply wrong, you can’t help but
get swept up in the narrative he is creating for himself. Joe happens to be a
weirdly likeable guy despite being a stalker and murderer with no conscience.
Kepnes does
an amazing job confusing who you are rooting for by letting you get to know Joe
as the hero he thinks he is, despite showing you every horrible thing he is
thinking. Joe’s narrative also has you truly hating those he sees as harmful to
Beck. You find yourself cheering him on
as he brings them to their end even as you know what he is doing is wrong.
As the
bodies start piling up, and Joe becomes more and more single-minded in his
obsession, will he escape detection? Will Beck escape his love unscathed? And
what outcome are you rooting for?! Well
written, intense, and decidedly disturbing, this thriller is well worth a
read!
