The Stalker - by Paula Bomer (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Brilliant, disturbing, and hilarious . . . [Doughty's] deficiencies only make Bomer's perverse odyssey more compelling . . . 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."
--Vogue

"A dark comic thrill . . . The details in Brooklyn author Paula Bomer's third novel land with unusual eeriness."
--Vulture

"Rarely does a book come along that rearranges perception and sings with psychological acuity. 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 Madwoman and Godshot

"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. Even his name--Doughty--is repugnant. 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

"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

"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, author of No One Left to Come Looking for You

"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

"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, finalist for the Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, and ITW Thriller Awards

"Bomer tracks the increasingly threatening behavior of a sociopath in her excellent and shocking latest . . . As Doughty insinuates his way into the lives and homes of [two] women, the novel enters into genuinely disturbing territory. Bomer is equally adept at rendering Doughty's warped psychology as she is with injecting dark humor into the proceedings . . . This is dark and twisted fun."
--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Unsettling . . . A compelling character study. Bomer has created an antagonist who is a unique blend of an even more troubled Holden Caulfield mixed with a less appealing Patrick Bateman. Readers' desire for Doughty to receive karmic retribution will propel them forward through the thriller's disconcerting content."
--Booklist

Praise for Paula Bomer

"Bomer offers her characters no outs--only the creeping sense that they're doomed to swing forever between futile attempts at self-determination."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Phenomenal."
--The Atlantic

"Dark, sharp, and hilarious."
--New York Magazine

"Haunting, defiant."
--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Bomer's book will be talked about because she writes with such honesty about sex, but it is in matters of the soul she is most honest. These are women laid bare. Bomer dares us to look."
--The Rumpus

"I inhaled this novel. Astute. Empathetic. Unsparing. Brilliant. Bomer pushes the emotional envelope--and then shoves harder."
--Thelma Adams, author of Bittersweet Brooklyn

About the Author