The Stalker
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
An Untalented Mr. Ripley, a Dumb American Psycho: A young man combines boundless self-confidence with perpetual failure and ineptitude as he tries to manipulate his way into a better life, preying on women in New York City in the early ’90s.
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The grifter in this disturbingly funny novel is definitely not a criminal mastermind—and that’s what makes it so darkly entertaining. Robert Doughten Savile, aka Doughty, sees himself as a charming, genius alpha male. How others see him…is another story. An entitled twentysomething living in ’90s Manhattan, Doughty believes the world owes him greatness and doesn’t mind manipulating others (especially women) in pursuit of it. But while the big-brained antiheroes of books and movies earn fame and fortune from their exploits, Doughty earns eye rolls, rejections, and consequences for his actions that he never learns from. At all. Paula Bomer pulls no punches in this takedown of toxic masculinity. Will Doughty ever realize that his offensive words and sociopathic actions are the reason nobody likes or respects him? You can take a guess. And yet it’s shocking, amusing, and even cathartic to watch him trip over his delusions again and again until he finally plummets into an ending we never saw coming.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bomer (Tante Eva) tracks the increasingly threatening behavior of a sociopath in her excellent and shocking latest. As a boy growing up in 1980s Darien, Conn., Robert "Doughty" Doughten Savile obsesses over The Karate Kid and George Carlin, berates his alcoholic mother, and commits such troubling acts as ashing his cigarette on his drunk friend's tongue. In the early '90s, he drops out of college and moves to New York City, convinced his class and economic privilege will make his life easy and pleasurable: "Knowing his place in the world meant knowing his due, meant knowing who he was." There, his drug use ramps up as he lies about working in real estate and sponges off of women, including the middle-aged book editor he's sleeping with and the young woman from back home he's trying to get with again. As Doughty insinuates his way into the lives and homes of both women, the novel enters into genuinely disturbing territory. Bomer is equally adept at rendering Doughty's warped psychology (he has an erotic fixation on condensation and enjoys rereading an encyclopedia entry on the word) as she is with injecting dark humor into the proceedings, such as when Doughty urinates "mostly to admire his dick." This is dark and twisted fun.
