THE STALKER
A LIT HUB MOST ANTICIPATED NOVEL OF 2025
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STARRED PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY OF 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
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.
photo by Patricia Aquino
