Creep

A Love Story

By: Emma van Straaten

Narrated by: Hanako Footman

""Creep is everything I want from a novel—it’s obsessive, it’s rapturous, it spirals into the most masochistic corners of the mind. A perfectly twisted debut.""—Anna Dorn, author of Perfume & Pain

""A chilling book by an exciting new voice.""—Vogue (UK)

From a blistering new voice in dark literary fiction, an unsettling portrait of loneliness, obsession, and identity which asks: if a stranger was left alone in your house, how well could they truly get to know you—enough to fall in love with you?

Alice and Tom are made for each other. Deeply connected, they share a flat in London, go to galleries together, enjoy the same books and wine. They even share a toothbrush. It’s all picture perfect.

Except Alice and Tom have never met.

Alice has been cleaning Tom’s apartment every Wednesday for a year. With every smudge wiped from his coffee cup, every multivitamin counted in the jar, Alice spirals deeper into infatuation, imagining a love so powerful it might erase a lifetime of self-hatred and loneliness.

But as Alice prepares for the moment when she and Tom will finally meet face-to-face, she discovers that love might not be the cure she thought it was. Instead, the line between fantasy and reality becomes ever more blurred, shattering everything Alice thought she knew.

Told in Alice’s compelling, deliciously acidic voice, Creep is a literary study of unreliability and unlikability. Exploring alienation, class, and race, it's a skilled debut with resonance in the way that we view women, mental health, and the lost in society.

• A great read for spooky-season nights
• A perfect addition to any Halloween reading list

[Published as This Immaculate Body in the UK]

Just wow!!!

This book definitely isn’t for everyone, but for those who are intrigued by dark, deeply flawed characters it is such a fascinating story and so beautifully written. Definitely a staple for “weird girl lit” fans! I hope to read more from this author soon!!!

recommend

Beautiful writing and unique premise. weird book for weird girls, as a compliment x x

Performance Made It

Really great listen. Miss Footman really made the prose sing like it properly should. Otherwise, I think the length was good, because it was growing a bit tiresome. The final moments felt truly glorious. I love psychological pride and this novel did not disappoint.

ending was disappointing

I felt like the whole story built up to an ending that was unfinished. it left me feeling like the book had no point other than at moments to make the reader feel uncomfortable. I was hoping for a more dynamic conclusion instead it just ended. maybe some readers will appreciate that? It just left me feeling like the author just wanted it to end and just stopped writing one day and turned in a manuscript.

not creepy, just very depressing

This isn't a thriller. Instead, it's a very depressing psychological study of a disturbed young woman. Alice is very troubled. She struggles with a binging disorder, for which she blames other people. She feels deep hostility toward nearly everyone in her life -family members, colleagues, people on the street. Her imagined relationship with Tom, the man she cleans for and who she has never actually met, is connected with a deluded sense of superiority. This story is a very well-crafted psychological portrait, but it was a very unpleasant listen. Alice's delusions were so ludicrous that I suspected from the beginning that they would have disastrous consequences. There were no real twists in the book where something very unexpected happened. Thriller fans will probably be disappointed. But the book is very well written.

A very strange story!

F, irst,eaI thought the narrator was perfect for the story. I wish the book had went on just a e little longer to see if Alice d could have gotten some help or found someone she could be happy with. Her obsession with Tom and her other people she thought were her lovers was very disturbing. I’m glad she sort of made up with her sistter. If I had bought a credit, I would have returned this book and gotten another. This book wasn’t the worst thing i’ve ever read, but I still don’t think it is very gd. Ood. If it wwowold have had a more satisfying ending I would have liked the book a lot more.

Couldn't finish

By the end of chapter one I decided I had no interest spending 7 hours with this hyperbolic, dramatically obsessive protagonist.