THE STALKER ON SALE NOW
“The Stalker is an eyeball-scorching wonder, another brilliant addition to the Bomer canon. Paula Bomer shows us once again why she’s one of the boldest, most intense but also most precisely observant and perversely funny novelists working today.”
—Sam Lipsyte
Bomer tracks the increasingly threatening behavior of a sociopath in her excellent and shocking latest…
Robert Doughten Savile, aka “Doughty,” is the son of a once-wealthy, now hard-up family from Darien, Connecticut. Doughty lives in a perpetual cloud of delusion, convinced of his own genius and status. While he has little capacity to accurately assess his own abilities or prospects, he cruises through life on the sheer force of his own sense of entitlement, dropping out of college and landing in the early ’90s in New York City, a place brimming with both prosperity and desperation. He cons his way from a bed at the YMCA into the posh Soho loft of a middle-aged book editor, while pursuing a young bartender, whom he also abuses and gaslights. He spins elaborate tales about his imaginary high-power job in real estate while, in reality, he passes his days watching comedy specials on VHS, smoking crack in Tompkins Square Park, and engaging in occasional sex work in the restrooms of Grand Central Station. His many failures, however, only serve to sharpen his one true gift: Doughty is a skilled predator, and the damage he inflicts on the women around him is real and remorseless. As shocking as it is illuminating, The Stalker confirms Paula Bomer as a contemporary master of the pitch-black comic novel.
Praise for The Stalker
“The Stalker is an eyeball-scorching wonder, another brilliant addition to the Bomer canon. Paula Bomer shows us once again why she’s one of the boldest, most intense but also most precisely observant and perversely funny novelists working today.”
—Sam Lipsyte
“The Stalker is an impeccable character study of the least self-aware man on earth. How often do we get to see a monster from his own vantage? With Paula Bomer in charge, a stylist of the highest order, I wanted to follow him anywhere. This novel is heart-pounding, endlessly entertaining, and in complete touch with humanity. Risky and brilliant, dark as hell and bitingly comic as only the masters can pull off. Wholly satisfying to the final glorious moment.”
—Chelsea Bieker, Author of Madwomen
“In her gripping new novel, The Stalker, Paula Bomer asks what it takes to survive the most destructive forms of masculinity. Ferocious and suspenseful, one part satire and two parts cautionary tale, its pages scorched my fingertips but I couldn’t put it down.”
—Alison B. Hart, Author of The Work Wife
“Paula Bomer’s The Stalker is unlike any book I have ever read. Bomer is the master of the interior monologue, taking us inside the mind of a completely unhinged, entirely reprehensible person. Bomer brings us an anti-hero so clueless while simultaneously so sure of himself that he is almost, and by this I mean almost, funny. Women, beware.”
—Marcy Dermansky, Author of Hot Air
“The Stalker is the kind of thrilling, demented literary fiction that will keep you reading late into the night and when you get to the end you’ll want to start it all over again. Masterful.”
—Bud Smith, Author of Teenager
“A portrait of an empty and hollow-eyed kid whose only gifts are limitless arrogance and an instinct for predation. Reading it made me feel soiled…The Stalker is somehow mirthless and genuinely hilarious at the same time…Paula Bomer stared down the barrel for this one.”
—Jayson Greene, author of UnWorld
“Paula Bomer is a voice I've come back to again and again—going against the grain, unafraid of wallowing in the shadows, unflinching in her prose. The Stalker is a powerful read, a book that left me unsettled and adrift."
—Richard Thomas, Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and Thriller Award finalist.
“Paula Bomer’s new novel, The Stalker (Soho Press), burns white hot. Robert “Doughty” Savile, a young sociopath wrapped in Brahmin pretensions, lacks the charisma and cleverness of an archetypal conman—but these deficiencies only make Bomer’s perverse odyssey more compelling. Brilliant, disturbing, and hilarious, the book follows Doughty as he moves from Connecticut’s suburbs to Boston’s campuses to, finally, New York City, destroying anything that gets in the way of the status he believes is his natural due. For all the obvious comparisons to Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley or Bret Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman, Doughty also serves as a male counterpart of Ottessa Moshfegh’s narrator in My Year of Rest and Relaxation: a blond narcissist who stares out onto a vanished Manhattan skyline through a cloud of drugs, desperation, and delusion. The final pages, as in Moshfegh’s work, will move readers with their unlikely and ultimately transcendent beauty.”
—Ian Malone