FICTION

Looker

Scribner. Jan. 2019. 192p. ISBN 9781501199110. $25; ebk. ISBN 9781501199134. F
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DEBUT The wine-drinking, window-watching, stoop-sitting unnamed narrator of Sims's gripping and intense debut gets her kicks from quietly spying on her famous actress neighbor and her family. As the narrator's marriage unravels, her fixation with the actress gets darker and more lethal. When the two meet at the neighborhood block party, and the narrator's attempt to make contact goes badly, she falls down a rabbit hole of fixated mania, becoming more and more obsessed to the point of building a shrine of household items found on the street in front of the actress's house in her own rundown brownstone apartment. Meanwhile, her dead-end job as a night school poetry professor goes south as her fantasies of a student edge toward reality.
VERDICT While brief, this twisted and tightly coiled tale will define obsession on a new level.
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