Bingo: Map. Obsessive narrator maps every detail of his stalkee’s life.
Have you ever read a book so awful it actually made you angry? Such is Caroline Kepnes’s You for me. The plot is easily summed up: a deranged bookstore worker fixates on a customer, getting more and more obsessed so that he commits multiple murders. He follows her, he accesses her email, he is a peeping tom, he sexually obsesses in repulsive fashion.
The narrator is absolutely repugnant. The murders are the least of his flaws, truly. When I say this book is awful, I don’t necessarily mean bad. Kepnes does an effective job of trapping the reader inside the narrator Joe’s obsession. It is claustrophobic and disgusting to spend a whole book in his head. It made me feel trapped and angry. To read the book was torture, and I have no answer as to why I didn’t put it down or yeet it out the window. The way Joe sexualizes the object of his fixation is uncomfortable and gross.
I suppose the book did what it set out to do: force the reader to spend time with a sociopath with no escape. It was unrelenting in this way, and deeply unpleasant. Good Reads allows fractions of stars now. I gave this half a star. It wasn’t even as good as that.
