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Joe Goldberg manages a New York bookshop. A woman called Guinevere Beck buys Paula Fox and he decides, within minutes, that they are meant to be together.

He finds her online, follows her, acquires her phone, reads her messages, and begins removing the people he considers obstacles. The entire novel is addressed to her.

He decided in the first minute, and everything after that is him arranging the circumstances.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Joe narrates to Beck throughout, which places the reader inside an address she never receives and makes his account of their relationship into a continuous act of construction.

The device is the book's central achievement: it renders obsession from inside without any distancing apparatus, and the discomfort is structural.

Joe is funny, literate, a good reader, and consistently scathing about people the reader is also likely to find irritating.

The novel's most effective and most uncomfortable quality is how frequently he is right about things, and how easily agreeing with him becomes a habit.

Joe's judgements about literature are used as a personality: what he thinks of a customer's purchase, what he lends, what he despises.

Kepnes uses reading as a marker of superiority that Joe deploys constantly, and the satire of a certain kind of literary self-regard is sharp.

She is a graduate student and a mediocre writer, self-absorbed, unreliable with her friends and considerably less interesting than Joe's account of her.

The novel is careful that this is his view. Her own messages and writing, which the reader sees, complicate it, and the gap is where the book does its work.

Joe's surveillance is conducted almost entirely through publicly available material: posts, locations, photographs, messages left accessible.

The novel is precise about how much can be assembled without any technical skill, and the point has become more rather than less relevant. Kepnes also has Joe explain his methods at length, which makes the novel read in places like an unintended instruction manual for a kind of attention.

The depiction of Manhattan literary aspiration — MFA programmes, unpaid internships, poetry readings, a wealthy friend who funds everything — is genuinely funny.

The comic material is sustained and gives the novel a register other stalker narratives do not have. The bookshop scenes in particular are sharp, and Joe's contempt for customers is frequently the most enjoyable writing in the book.

The killings are described briefly and Joe's justifications are extensive, and the disproportion between the two is deliberate.

He spends far more words explaining why someone deserved it than describing what he did, which is an accurate rendering of how such reasoning works. Kepnes also declines to give him any trauma or explanation, which removes the reader's usual route to understanding and leaves only the reasoning itself.

A television series has run for several seasons and has made the character considerably more widely known, with a substantially more sympathetic performance.

The show's popularity, and the audience response to its protagonist, has become a commentary on the novel's own argument about charm. The series also softens Joe considerably and supplies motivation the novel withholds, which changes the nature of the reader's discomfort substantially.

Kepnes has written several further books following Joe, which continue the second-person narration.

The first is the most effective, largely because the device's discomfort depends on novelty that repetition necessarily reduces. They also relocate him repeatedly, which supplies fresh satirical targets while leaving the central technique unchanged across several books.

Fast, contemporary and heavily voiced, with the narration carrying everything and almost no description.

Kepnes's control of a single sustained voice across a full novel is the book's technical achievement, and the register never slips. Kepnes also writes Beck's own prose deliberately badly when it appears, which is a difficult thing to do well and is consistently funny.

Readers who want a genuinely uncomfortable reading experience and can tolerate spending a novel inside a perspective they should not be enjoying.

It is funnier and better written than its premise suggests. Readers who dislike being made complicit should choose something else on this shelf.