My Stalkers

Cementing her mastery across genres, Catherine Lacey returns with a new collection of visceral and absurdist short fiction.

Across the nine stories in My Stalkers, Catherine Lacey’s second collection of short fiction, women are constantly confronted with the thrill, banality, and horror of becoming someone else—or no one at all—on account of men, technology, bureaucracy, or their own folly.

A woman finds a coat that isn’t hers in the house, and its appearance sets off a chain of events that destroys her life as she knew it. A mountain, one kilometer high, spontaneously materializes in rural Kansas, composed entirely of semiconscious men, provoking a female amateur athlete to climb it. An American living in Mexico is forced to face her irrevocable dependence on her home country, and the fragility of her own identity, when her passport is stolen. A woman is charged with a crime her all-seeing government insists it has photographic evidence of her committing, though she insists it was a doppelgänger, and while attempting to dispute the charge, the Kafkaesque bureaucracy becomes increasingly manipulative. And in the title story, a woman desperate to live any life but her own works as a Life Rotator, anonymously shuffled between a series of sparsely furnished homes in average American cities; her stalker finds her anyway, and threatens to topple her artificial stability.

With penetrating insights into the absurdities of modern life, Lacey once again reveals the disquieting and darkly humorous forces at work beneath the surface of the ordinary.