Thursday, July 18, 2024

Six creepy novels about stalking and obsession

Born and raised in North London, S.B. Caves is the international bestselling author of A Killer Came Knocking and I Know Where She Is, which The Sun described as "sinister, unsettling and gripping."

His new high concept thriller is Honeycomb.

Caves now lives in South London with his wife and two sons.

At CrimeReads the author tagged six creepy novel about stalking and obsesson "with some of the most twisted plots and even more twisted antagonists." One titele on the list:
The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

This masterfully layered, epic autofiction thriller recounts the author’s final years at a prestigious high school in the early eighties. The arrival of Robert Mallory, a gorgeous new boy who inserts himself into Ellis’s elite circle of friends, kickstarts the novel’s central mystery. After a few acute observations, Ellis almost intuitively feels that something is deeply amiss with Mallory, though Ellis is seemingly the only one picking up on all his apparent lies and contradictions. At the same time, there is a sadistic serial killer known as The Trawler stalking LA, and a strange, Manson-like satanic cult running wild through the city. While dealing with the complexities of his deteriorating social life, Ellis is unable to shake the idea that Robert is in fact The Trawler, and this unwavering conviction eventually leads to a violent confrontation.

The depiction of The Trawler’s atrocities is beyond horrific and genuinely unnerving. Though, what might not be apparent upon a first read is just how clever this novel really is. There is so much going on beneath the surface here. The Shards almost demands a second and third readthrough so we can more closely analyze our narrator’s intentions and behavior toward this attractive ‘God’ that appears to throw Ellis’s life into flux. It is then that we collate clues that might have been missed originally. Is Mallory really the problem, or is Ellis’s paranoid fascination with him blowing things out of proportion? Could Mallory really be the maniacal murderer on the rampage, or is our narrator’s unhealthy fixation a symptom of something darker?
Read about another novel on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue