THE STALKER
A LIT HUB MOST ANTICIPATED NOVEL OF 2025
PREORDER NOW!
STARRED PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY FOR THE STALKER
“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.”
“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 Madwomen
“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. 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
“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
“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
About the Book
A young man combines boundless self-confidence and profound stupidity as he attempts to con his way through New York City in the early ’90s. You might call him an Untalented Mr. Ripley, a Dumb American Psycho—but even as his lies and delusions become increasingly absurd, the damage he inflicts is real and remorseless.
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 certain that the wealth and high status that he believes to be his birthright are just around the corner. 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 New York City in the early ‘90s, a city brimming with both prosperity and desperation. He cons his way from a bed at the YMCA to a posh Soho loft, and enters abusive, gaslighting relationships with a pair of women, a bartender and a middle-aged book editor. He spins elaborate tales about his imaginary high-power job in real estate while, in reality, he passes his days watching VHS tapes of George Carlin specials, smoking crack in Tompkins Square Park, and engaging in occasional sex work in the restrooms of Grand Central Station.
Fans of true crime podcasts about con men like Dirty John and Who the Hell Is Hamish? will revel in this novel and its portrait of the sociopath as a young loser. The Stalker is horrifying and illuminating, shocking yet hilarious, a novel that confirms Paula Bomer as a contemporary master of pitch-black comic fiction.
photo by Patricia Aquino
