She created a beautiful world. Now he wants it all.
On her way to a speaking engagement, bestselling novelist Eli Grey gets into a cab and accepts a drink from the driver, trusting that everything is fine. She wakes up chained in the stranger’s basement. With no close family or friends expecting her to check in, Eli knows she needs to save herself. She soon realizes that her abduction wasn’t random, and though she thinks she might recognize her captor, she can’t figure out what he wants. Her only clues are that he’s very familiar with her books and deeply invested in the fantastical world she creates. What follows is a test of wills as Eli pits herself against a man who believes she owes him everything—and is determined to take it from her.
Terrifying and timely, set against the backdrop of convention culture and the MeToo reckoning, Number One Fan unflinchingly examines the tension between creator and work, fandom and source material, and the rage of fans who feel they own fiction.
I picked this up because I read the blurb and got strong Misery vibes. It’s like Misery in that you have a crazed fan and a captured author. But it goes off the rails a bit from there. The best parts of the books were the looks at author culture- including on social media- as well as Con culture and the interactions between fans, authors, critics, and fan fic writers. Also Eli has the BEST assistant known to mankind. #JoeIsAwesome.
The book moves fast, and it’s all entertaining and thrilling and at various points rather squick inducing. I feel like it goes a little far with the villain and big reveal- it’s not all super plausible, but otherwise it’s a good time where you always know who you are rooting for (though I could stand for a little less sympathy for our villain). There are some superficial nods to recent blow ups in the writing world- the Slate, Puppies, etc. But it’s cursory and you don’t need to be plugged into those spaces to understand what’s going on.
The part that really sticks with me is the ending. It’s…really depressing? And VERY cynical. What I can’t decide is if the author intended that as some sort of commentary, or if she felt that it was a happy ending. I wish I knew, because that would honestly change how I felt about the book as a whole. If anyone else read this, what do you think?
