Annakeara Stinson’s harrowing and sharp debut is a bicoastal story of a breakup that becomes dangerous when the protagonist Clarice’s ex-boyfriend P.T. becomes obsessive and begins a terrifying stalking campaign. The novel picks up with Clarice at a bar in L.A., where she’s lived since breaking up with P.T. 3 years prior, when she spots a man at the bar whom she’s immediately convinced is P.T. flirting with a bartender. The sighting is deeply destabilizing for her, she hasn’t seen P.T. since she fled New York after getting a restraining order against him, and has lived in the intervening years as a relatively anonymous person trying to avoid his detection. She struggles to communicate her fear to her friends and family, who initially doubt the sighting and question its validity, asking pointedly if Clarice’s paranoia may have convinced her to see P.T. in this stranger.
Clarice describes her life in LA in bleak terms: “I am withered by life’s blows, a hermit…I go to therapy twice a week and have the sexual prowess of unleavened bread.” Since her breakup and the terror of being stalked and harassed relentlessly, her life has become mostly insular: she has few friends and works a remote and undemanding job that allows her to sleep away most of her days. She has no interest in dating or letting people in because of her past, and the always-present fear that P.T. could find her and do something really dangerous. After the initial sighting she goes down a rabbit hole online trying to figure out P.T.’s potential whereabouts, trying to figure out if he found her or any clues as to his existence.
The novel flashes back from the present intermittently to the demise of their relationship, which was at first explosive but then became very toxic: she’s initially attracted to his dark artistic energy, but soon realizes that he’s deeply manipulative and unreliable, unable to take responsibility for his own behavior and insistent upon lashing out and throwing around baseless accusations. When they finally breakup after month’s of Clarice threatening to leave him—he’s admitted to sleeping with a woman from a dating app—he begins reaching out to her via text and calls incessantly. When she tells him that she’s not interested in any further contact, his behavior escalates quickly, and he begins creating fake phone numbers and email accounts to reach out to her repeatedly and avoid blocking, sends strange packages and mail to her, and even hangs out around her workplace.
Clarice finally goes to court to get a restraining order after months of this behavior, at the urging of her close friends, and then flees to LA to begin a new life. But she’s still plagued by fear of P.T. and struggling with demons from her youth: her violent addict father reaching out from his deathbed, and her mother’s impending marriage after a series of terrible stepfathers. As Clarice gets deeper in her search to locate P.T. and figure out if he lives in LA, the people around her become increasingly suspicious that she’s not living in reality and her trauma is manifesting as delusion. The novel takes on a noir-ish quality as Clarice goes on various quests to figure out the truth and investigate her surroundings—and the reader gets swept up in her efforts as the truth becomes blurry and uncertain.
The novel is a fast-paced and breathless detective story, but also a sobering exploration of the effects of stalking, and what its like to encounter men who “cause you a kind of fear so deep it never leaves, only sleeps.” Stinson manages to find a dark humor in Clarice’s circumstances, and the novel offers a thoughtful and incisive portrayal of relationships and coming-of-age in unstable circumstances. A wholly non-judgemental novel that never shies away from complicated character sketches and the nuances of human flaws.