Book Review: The Stalker by Paula Bomer

Paula Bomer’s brief but penetrating latest, The Stalker, opens with three quotes that perfectly encapsulate the novel’s themes:

“With lies you may go ahead in the world, but you can never go back.” – Russian Proverb

“He didn’t look at you, he looked through you.” – Anonymous

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” – Maya Angelou

Doughty grew up in the wealthy enclave of Darien, Connecticut. His family fortune is all but gone, but he still carries himself with an air of entitlement, believing that he is owed a quality of life that is now well outside of his means. Convinced that his good looks, imagined status, and self-supposed superior intellect are all he needs to achieve this, he drops out of college and heads to New York City where he manipulates and uses people to begin his ascent.

Contrary to his own deluded self-image however, he isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks and, though he is able to charm his way into more than one woman’s apartment, the people he meets begin to grow weary of him and his juvenile mind games. As he becomes addicted to hard drugs and his web of lies grows more difficult to maintain, his behavior becomes increasingly erratic, putting everyone in his orbit in ever greater danger.

Anyone who’s ever known an attractive asshole can easily imagine why his friends and girlfriends would be drawn to Doughty in the first place, and even why many of them reluctantly stick by him despite how he mistreats them. It is unlikely that most of us have met someone as dangerously sociopathic as he is though, a fact for which we should consider ourselves lucky. No one who meets him comes away unharmed, as his remorseless selfishness spurs him on to consume everything he can take from the world around him.

Representing the worst impulses and traits being celebrated by online “manosphere” predators like Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, and Adin Ross, Doughty is perhaps one of the most morally repulsive characters put to the page in years. Despite that, Bomer’s fast paced and darkly comic writing keeps the reader riveted, unable to turn away as his behavior becomes ever more repugnant. Given the extreme unlikability of the main character, The Stalker won’t be for everyone, but for those who can get into it, it lingers long after the grim conclusion. ★★★★½