Looker

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In this taut, arresting debut, a woman becomes fixated on her neighbor—the actress. 

Though the two women live just a few doors apart, a chasm lies between them. The actress, a celebrity with a charmed career, shares a gleaming brownstone with her handsome husband and three adorable children, while the recently separated narrator, unhappily childless and stuck in a dead-end job, lives in a run-down, three-story walk-up with her ex-husband’s cat.

As her fascination grows, the narrator’s hold on reality begins to slip. Before long, she’s collecting cast-off items from the actress’s stoop and fantasizing about sleeping with the actress’s husband. After a disastrous interaction with the actress at the annual block party, what began as an innocent preoccupation turns into a stunning—and irrevocable—unraveling. Immersive and darkly entertaining, Looker is a searing psychological portrait of obsession.

PRAISE FOR LOOKER

An Indie Next Great Reads Pick
A Vogue Best Novels of 2019 Pick
An Esquire UK Best Books of 2019 (So Far) Pick
A Star-Ledger Top Ten New Jersey Authors of 2019 Pick
A CrimeReads Ten Best Fiction Debuts of 2019 Pick
A People Magazine Best New Books Pick
An Entertainment Weekly Best New Books of January Pick
A Southern Living Best New Books of Winter 2019 Pick
A Vogue and LitHub Most Anticipated Books of 2019 Pick

“It’s easy to imagine that stars live gauzily perfect lives. But what happens when the illusion turns deadly? [Sims’s narrator] reveals her instability slowly. By the end you’ll be gasping.”

—People Magazine

“Looker is a sugarcoated poison pill of psychological terror, whose wit and fluency cover its lacerating diagnosis of the deranging effects of envy, perhaps the most widespread social sickness of our age.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Written in the intimate first-person, this is a wicked slow-burn . . . Sims perfectly drives in the knife . . . when you least expect it.”

—Entertainment Weekly

“In prose that moves between lyrical and caterwauling, the poet Laura Sims has pulled off the high-wire act of making bitterness delicious.”

—Vogue

“In the end, the Hitchcockian thrills of Looker prove only skin-deep; the book unmasks itself as a twisted portrait of pain. At a hundred and eighty pages, [Looker] lasts about as long as a movie, and not even half as long as a full night’s sleep. It’s an ephemeral fiction with a hard landing—like a window, seen in passing, that glows and goes dark.”

—The New Yorker

“Laura Sims . . . has written a spectacular debut novel . . . Her [narrator’s] stunning descent takes her deep into darkness, and Sims’ masterful ending caps a book which does everything right.”
—The Star-Ledger

“Looker is a powerful sylph of a book about creation and destruction and the permeable boundary between them.”

—Lisa Levy, Lit Hub

“This debut is a penetrating and unsettling psychological thriller. . . It’s a novel about identity, appearances, and envy, and it’s one of the season’s most timely reads, an innovative experiment in what a thriller can be.”

—Dwyer Murphy, Lit Hub

“Is Looker a warning? A character study? An exploration of grief? A critique of American culture? It is all of these things, as well as a novel about what it means to be seen—and what it means to be unseen. Most essentially, it is a heady thriller that asks a reader to engage with a narrator who has been told by circumstance that she has nothing to live for, and who fills the empty spaces in her life with an unhealthy obsession. Looker demands the reader look at—really gaze at, live with, and experience—dangerous obsession, but more pointedly, the societal expectations that might lead to it in the first place.”

—Ploughshares

“Reading Looker, it is clear that Sims’s background is in poetry, because each word is chosen for maximum effect and evokes a visceral reaction in the reader. As you read, you can feel the urban setting all around you and you feel pulled along in the protagonist’s life, embarrassed when she is, confused when she is and angry when she is . . .Will you feel a bit uneasy after reading Looker? Probably. Will you regret reading it? Absolutely not.”
—Essex News Daily

“A literary masterpiece you can read in one sitting . . . While Looker is short—less than 200 pages—it’s packed with themes of obsession, jealousy, and madness. Laura Sims made every word count.”
—Real Simple  (“23 Great Books You Won’t Be Able to Put Down”)

“This short debut novel by poet Sims comes to a sudden and shattering climax that left me doubled over in mental anguish. A truly brilliant novel.”

—The Cape Times (South Africa)

“You’d pick up this slim, cool-looking number and think it was a thriller. But Looker packs much more in, plumbing pain, loss and envy, and the way they can curdle a life. It’s confronting and invigorating, a fine portrait of a psyche on the edge. . . Sims’s version of a twist in the tail is that the book itself becomes the obsession. By the end. . . you won’t be able to look away.”

—The New Zealand Listener 

“Sims keeps us inside her stalker’s head the whole time, so that her unhappiness and resentment are fully understandable and the reader feels involved and even complicit in whatever may be about to happen. It’s a psychological thriller in all but name, and cultivates its atmosphere of foreboding brilliantly.”
—The Herald (UK)

“I loved Looker for its take on the female gaze, and its understanding of what it means for women to look at each other. It’s a way of seeing which is not just an inverted male gaze, or internalized misogyny. It has a poison all its own. . .This is a novel I had been craving: an unflinching portrayal of women looking upon each other as disturbingly as men do.”

—New Statesman (UK)

“The unnamed narrator of this slender, noir-ish novel is a voyeur who’s also intensely aware – in the way that few women escape – of the way that she herself appears.”

—The Observer (UK)

“A simmering sense of dread dominates this brilliant Brooklyn-set debut . . . dazzlingly creepy storytelling, reminiscent of NOTES ON A SCANDAL.”

—Grazia (UK)

“Laura Sims brings the tweezered precision of the classical musician to literature. . . [Looker] isn’t always an easy read, but it is taut, compelling, and packed with memorable phrases. It sings like a perfectly tuned piano.”

—The Big Issues (UK)

“A slim novel (maybe even a novella?) that has maximum drama . . . when does idle fantasy become a dangerous obsession?”

—Red Online (UK)

“A short, bracing shock of a novel, easily gulped down in one sitting…that explores ideas about femininity and desirability via a thriller-style plot.”
—Metro (UK)

“A compelling debut, with echoes of Hitchcock throughout.”
—Image Magazine (UK)

“Written with a precise and sinister elegance, this is a gripping portrait of one woman’s descent into madness.”
—Heat World (UK)

“Sims delivers a clever character study of a woman who may not be very likable, but still inspires sympathy. A gripping and multi-layered novel.”
—Woman’s Weekly (UK)

“Taut and chilling.”

—Daily Express (UK)

“Tense, twisted, and briskly paced, poet Laura Sims’s debut novel, Looker, is the progressively disturbing story of one woman’s grief-fueled spiral downward to an irredeemable rock-bottom. . . Somewhat surprisingly, the most disturbing thing about Looker is the creeping sense of complicity that Sims engenders in the reader. . . By the end, Sims compels us to ask: have we been deranged, predatory voyeurs into the actress’s life—or into the narrator’s?”

—Shelf Awareness

“Jealousy rears its ugly head in Sims’s chilling and riveting debut. . . In this tightly plotted novel, Sims takes the reader fully into the mind of a woman becoming increasingly unhinged, and turns her emotionally fraught journey into a provocative tale about the dangers of coveting what belongs to another.”

—Publishers Weekly, starred review 

“This twisted and tightly coiled tale will define obsession on a new level.” 
—Library Journal

“Readers fond of protagonists who profess to guzzling wine at nine a.m. will breeze right through this one’s bad decisions, moments of shocking clarity and cruelty, and—no spoilers!—total undoing. A dark and stylish drama featuring a self-aware yet unstable narrator.”
—Booklist 

“Like a modern-day version of Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ Sims’s novel shows the warped reality and claustrophobic mentality of a person losing a grip on her moral compass. [With] original and electric moments. . .[Looker] gallops along at top speed.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Vitriolic and shudderingly relatable, Looker is the perfect cautionary tale for those who have had enough of the #blessed ones.”

—Powell’s Staff Pick 

“A perfect, dark pleasure. . .A rare debut filled with gorgeous sentences, savory twists, and shot through with ferocious truths, this is the kind of book that can only be written by an author who is thrillingly unafraid.”
—Mona Awad, author of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

“Sims’s debut is a breathless and unrelenting portrait of one woman’s unraveling.”
—Greer Hendricks, New York Times bestselling co-author of The Wife Between Us

“With an agile precision reminiscent of Lydia Davis, Laura Sims captures the obsessiveness of a woman who unravels after the collapse of her marriage. A taut, gripping portrait, all the more sinister for its elegance.”

—Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks

“Like Polanski’s “Repulsion,” Laura Sims’s intense, gripping first novel shoehorns us into a gathering sense of dread, heightened at every turn by our sympathy for her relentlessly unraveling protagonist. The precise, observant writing slips through the skin without ever calling attention to itself.”

—Peter Straub, author of A Dark Matter and Interior Darkness

“A tightly coiled novel about the poison of resentment. With arresting candor, Laura Sims reveals how fatally it can destroy one’s relationship to the world.”

—Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew

“This riveting cautionary tale chronicles the catastrophic downward spiral of a woman whose situation exposes the fragility of human happiness. In language as piercing as the story itself, Sims offers an intense portrait of obsession. Looker is the work of a fierce and fearless writer.”

—Helen Phillips, author of The Beautiful Bureaucrat