'YOU' REVIEW......WHEN LOVE GOES STALK RAVING MAD.....

YOU by Caroline Kepnes (2015) took us back to that wonderfully perverse moment in Hitchcock's "Psycho". (If you haven't seen "Psycho", stop reading this paragraph.....actually, if you haven't seen it, either start watching it on the device you're using right now, or go find a copy....immediately.) Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates, having stuffed Janet Leigh's perforated body in the trunk of her car, pushes the car into a swampy pond and anxiously awaits its total submergence. Down and down it goes....until it suddenly stops, only halfway under water. Uh-oh......Perkins holds his breath in worry......and for a guilty moment, identifying with his plight.....so do we!  For a few seconds, nasty genius Hitchcock has turned us all into Norman's co-conspirators, praying for Janet and her car to go fully glub glub....

               Which is what author Caroline Kepnes accomplishes through the entire length of her brilliantly funny and horrific thriller "You". Her outrageous choice here is to have the book First Person narrated by its sociopath stalker/killer, Joe Goldberg, a young New York City bookstore manager searching for his soulmate. Forgoing college, but self-schooled from his avid reading, Joe takes you on a pop-culture bibliophile's rollercoaster through his deeply sick mind, loaded with hilarious, pithy references to books, films and music.

               Joe's new overwhelming obsession, severely Manic Pixie Dreamgirl Guinevere Beck (of just plain Beck, as she prefers) is a borderline nymphomaniac graduate student pursuing an MFA in creative writing. Minus the propensity for homicide, she's almost as crazy as Joe, so you can see why he falls hard for her. As a dedicated psychotic stalker, Joe fully devotes himself to hacking all her social media devices, cherishing her stolen underwear, you know, the usual stuff.....and it won't take you long to figure out it's lethally dangerous for anyone to stand between Joe, the wise-ass demented Don Quixote, and Beck, his hot-to-trot Dulcinea.

                Joe's irresistible narration, stuffed with jokes and assorted withering witticisms, makes the book resemble "Annie Hall" re-filmed as a horror movie......you won't know whether to laugh or cringe. (His ludicrous mis-adventures in stalking Beck including excursions to a costume party and a dead-of-winter Rhode Island resort would make perfect romantic comedy sequences, if it weren't for the fact that Joe's a monster....)

                That's all we dare tell you about this book, except that Beached Quill considers it a must-read and gruesomely awards it 5 creepy stars (*****) a most definite FIND OF FINDS.