I find books about obsessions to be fascinating, but this one walked a tentative line between interesting and unsettling. I didn't enjoy inhabiting Alice's mind (which is clearly the intention) but the story was too long and overwritten for her perspective to be tolerable. Von Straaten is fabulous at portraying her unreliable perspective and spiraling descent into instability, but the author's talent couldn't overcome how unpleasant the story was to read. Recommended for fans of Netflix's Baby Reindeer.

3.5 STARS

Creep by Emma van Straaten
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Themes: unhinged narrator, class and race, body image, mental health and loneliness

Alice knows everything about Tom. Alice is Tom’s house cleaner. She’s convinced they’re soulmates destined for true love. But they’ve never met. As she prepares for them to finally meet face to face, it goes exactly how you’d expect — and Alice’s life unravels.

A book about unhinged women behaving badly? Count me in. Creep was disturbing, twisted, suspenseful, revolting and raw — a real page-turner.

For fans of… My Husband (Maud Ventura) and Piglet (Lottie Hazell)

Thanks to #NetGalley and Harper Perennial for an advanced reader copy of #Creep.

Alice and Tom are perfect for each other. Except they've never met. Okay well... Alice believes that they're perfect for each other as she has been cleaning Tom's apartment for the last year and just knows that they are meant to be. They enjoy the same books and wine, they even share the same toothbrush. It's picture perfect.

The synopsis for this book was quite interesting to me and I felt there were moments of the book that I was genuinely along for the ride of the story, but a lot of the time I felt my mind wandering.

Creep is a story that made me feel a lot of different emotions I wasn't expecting to feel. It opens up and immediately we know Alice is delulu and entirely obsessed, but as we spend more time in her head, I couldn't help but feel for her and even relate to her. This was such a great roller coaster of emotions in the most delightfully uncomfortable setting.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for the review copy!

3.5 rounded up - Thank you netgalley for an early copy of this book!

This book reminded me a bit of I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel, combined with Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan - I loved Acts of Desperation and didn’t care for She’s a Fan so this hits in the middle for me:)

Thank you Harper Perennial and Netgalley for this advanced readers copy. It is also being published under the title “This Immaculate Body,” so don’t be confused if you see that one around.

It’s a shorter book, only about 250 pages or so, and the depth of Alice’s obsession with Tom aka “Him” - clearly the capitalization is an indication of her so-called reverence and devotion to this man she’s never met - can be unsettling. That’s right… never met. Just cleans his apartment once a week.. and goes through all his things, lies in his bed, tries on his clothes, snoops in his email, etc. Such begins Creep.

It reads more like train of thought, not exactly plot driven like I went in expecting. Alice isn’t just obsessed; she is full-on delusional, crafting a world inside her mind inside Tom’s apartment of the two of them and what their life would be like together once they finally meet. Deep. Ardent. Unifying. The more consuming this fixation becomes the more disdain she has for other people and for the real world; the more extreme her actions. Alice is more comfortable in her fantasy than she would be to try to engage in real friendships, to repair the relationships with her sister and mom, to do more than just coast in her job.

Beyond her infatuation with Tom we also come to understand that Alice has had a long history of struggling with self-image and food, and these become deeply tied to her delusions; a battle of soothing her inner aches of loneliness and self-loathing in a detrimental fashion. As she plots her “chance meeting” with the one whom she deems her soulmate, she becomes increasingly unhinged. And when they finally do meet... well, you’ll just have to read to find out what happens.

As a psych and mental health worker I read this through those lenses, crafting a case study on Alice and her desires, her scorn, and the roots of where these stem from. Was it interesting? Yes, though quite disturbing at times, leaving readers cringing with discomfort. Content includes an eating disorder and some self harm, light sexual content, references to body parts, light profanity, and a brief but detailed serial killer fantasy.

If you like weird, sad girl lit fic, then this is for you. If not, then I’d creep away from this one.

A woman unhinged and behaving badly? I am in! This story is not going to be heartwarming or have a happy ending, so keep that in mind when reading it. Alice is 100% a creep - she is stalking a man that she thinks she is in love with and is absolutely disgusting with the things she does to be close to him. It gives Baby Reindeer vibes, though I think Alice is a bit more honest than the woman from that story. There is quite a lot of commentary about the hypocrisy of being a woman, body image issues, familial relationships, and the dishonesty of social media & group chats. I highlighted quite a few lines since they were so insightful.

I can't remember the last book that kept me reading past 12am (probably a YA fantasy, if I'm being totally honest) but my god was I hooked. Creep was exactly what was advertised—a few hundred pages of questionable, creepy behavior dappled with stalking, manipulation, and some deeply psychotic actions. There was also a unique perspective in that the reader is sitting in the head (or holding the hand of) the narrator, who is the titular creep, so that sense of dread and foreboding felt a little uncertain (are we in control of the story or just along for the ride).

HOWEVER [SPOILER] I was totally caught off guard by the ending—just when you think you're getting a redemption arc—for the main character, for her mental and physical health, for her relationship with her sister (oh it's actually ok she was just misunderstood!)—she goes and does what she does, and the book closes, and the reader is left haunted and reeling.

What an exhilarating read, through and through. If I had one complaint it would be that there was abundant commentary on the subject of the main character's eating habits and weight, but it didn't seem to bridging into the territory of generalization, which helped.

Thank you to Harper Perennial for the opportunity to read and review!

3.5⭐️

Literary Fiction • Contemporary • Obsession
Pub Date • 25 February 2025

Thank you @harperperennial and @librofm for the ARC & ALC. ♡

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 𝚙𝚒𝚌𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚎 𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚏𝚎𝚌𝚝.

·∘⋆⊹ 𝙴𝚡𝚌𝚎𝚙𝚝 𝙰𝚕𝚒𝚌𝚎 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚃𝚘𝚖 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚗𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛 𝚖𝚎𝚝. ⊹⋆∘·

A story of obsession. A love story manifested into reality. This is dark, it’s salacious, it’s twisted. It doesn’t pull its punches. Just when you think she can go no deeper in depravity, watch out.

Word choices and poetic prose create a vivid scene. My jaw kept dropping as I listened to this at the nail salon. Is Alice unreliable or is this a matter of a warped perspective?

The world is not always kind, especially toward blue collar, discarded portions of society, women who don’t fit the mold.

Society is now ever always connected, yet we are lonelier than ever before, longing for real connection. Race, gender, and class issues are explored.

Although I wanted more from the ending, a final twist or a more fleshed out conclusion, this is without a doubt an impressive debut.

‧₊˚🎧 ₊˚⊹♡ Narrator Hanako Footman did an excellent job narrating this on audio; loved her accent! For top tier enjoyment, tandem audio + book is the way to go. Each word matters in the prose.

(4.5/5, rounded up)
Creep by @evswrites made me skip a hair wash night AND wake up early the next morning to finish it, I was so wrapped up. Iykyk, that says a lot.

It came as a pleasant surprise that Emma’s unruly, grandiose FMC wasn’t what I’m used to in these obsessive narratives. The parasociality paves a clearer path to Alice’s inner thoughts than in My Husband by Maude Ventura (which I know & LOVE, but still feel this differs from).

While both are written in a stream of consciousness style, Creep is much more disjointed and deceitful. By and large you can trust My Husband’s unnamed main character, whether she goes a little overboard or not. Annie—not so much. Creep is much harder to settle into, in a good way. Looking back at the notes I made while reading I saw the term “emotional jump-scare” and I’m stickin to it. The suspense & bafflement propels the heck outta this one, and I loved it.

This primary romantic relationship isn’t the whole story. There are many more layers to Creep—entire storylines I’m not mentioning. It’s purposeful I’ve left more out!! My advice is the less you know going into this, the better. Let Annie (well, really Emma) do the surprising.
Even as my 417th book for 2024, I. Did. Not. See. The. Ending. Coming!!!!

Thank you bunches to Emma, @harperperennial and @netgalley for the print & eARC ❣️

Have you ever come across a book that was simultaneously one of the most disturbing and most beautifully written you’ve ever read?

I’ve only felt this way about one other book, and that was Nabokov’s Lolita; and like Lolita, Creep is so much more than it seems on the surface, sharing that same dark vein of satire and caustic examination of capitalism and beauty standards, combined with lush, decadent prose that unspools into ribbony sentences that then fold into these decadent paragraphs with amazing texture and imagery.

Our protagonist, Alice, is a study in displacement. She feels she is not enough of one thing or another–consistently caught in the middle of two worlds in every manner but one–therefore she is no one and nothing. She’s not light-skinned enough to pass for caucasian but not dark enough to pass for being West African. Not poor enough to be considered pitiful and worthy of sympathy but not rich enough to go to a posh school and be popular by virtue of money. Not dumb enough to not work but not smart enough to get an excellent job. Most of all, Alice feels painfully overshadowed by her thin and beautiful sister, who has always excelled at everything Alice fails at.

Alice could be almost anyone working in the gig economy today, and there’s the dark thrill of it all. She could be your DoorDash driver, Uber, dog walker. In Creep, she’s in your home and she’s cleaning your house. She’s lonely, she’s lost, she’s curious about your life, and she can poke and prod through your entire apartment without you knowing what she’s touched. She has the time to make up stories about you based on your social media and what’s on your walls, your fridge. She empties your trash. I can’t think of anything more terrifying, and yet I’ve never felt like someone needed a hug more than Alice. 5⭐️

🩶 What to Expect 🩶

🍒 Erotomania
💣 Delusional protagonist
🍒 Sentences so pretty they might make you cry
💣 She was lit major
🍒 Un coup de coeur
💣 Internalized misogyny
🍒 Eating disorder
💣 Violent thoughts
🍒 Shaping your world around him
💣 You must hide who you are or no one will ever love you
🍒 Imaginary anniversaries
💣 Toxic parenting
🍒 Imagined slights
💣 Really holding a grudge
🍒 Superstitions & magical thinking
💣 Self-harming
🍒 Ingestion of questionable materials
💣 Being tested
🍒 Visiting the old folks home for entirely selfish reasons
💣 Jane Eyre is not the best model for a great romance
🍒 NGL, there is a good bit of grossness
💣 Desiring to be small and stay small
🍒 If I had been less me and more…
💣 Touch starvation
🍒 It was love, don’t you see that?
💣 Oh the possibilities!


I was provided a copy of this title by the author and publisher via Netgalley. All thoughts, opinions, views, and ideas expressed herein are mine and mine alone. Thank you.

File Under: 5 Star Review/Literary Fiction/OwnVoices/Psychological Thriller/Suspense Thriller/Women’s Fiction

This book was so bizarre and disturbing that I could not put it down. There were so many uncomfortable moments that had me saying WTF?! Alice’s thought process was dark and intense, yet also captivating.

When it came to the writing, I found it to be very over-detailed and chaotic, which made it hard to follow the story at times, but in the same breath the writing style made sense considering how unhinged Alice’s state of mind was.

Thank you Harper Collins for sending a free copy!

Thank you so much to Netgalley and Harper Perennial for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

4.75 stars rounded up

CW: disordered eating, suicidal thoughts, stalking

What an insane ride this book was! I absolutely loved it - I was eating this up and left no crumbs (iykyk)! The writing immediately sucked me in. It exemplified so well Alice's obsessive thoughts and how deeply she believed them. The very repetitive prose really did a great job of showing us exactly what it's like in Alice's mind. The opening chapter was incredibly bizarre and creepy in the best way. And the rest of the story followed suit. The author did a great job of making me empathize for a character who is clearly suffering from mental health issues, but was also doing the most unforgiveable things. I also really loved how Alice's relationship with food was portrayed and how it acted as coping mechanism for her.

By the time we reached the midpoint, my jaw was wide open almost the whole time I was reading. It was like watching a trainwreck and being unable to look away. It was dislocated and on the floor by the end of it. I personally LOVED the ending. I think it was incredibly realistic for the way Alice had been portrayed throughout the book. I felt it was inevitable and incredibly satisfying. What a fantastic debut for the author! I can't way to see what they do next.

I wish I could give half star ratings because this book definitely doesn’t deserve a 3 but 4 feels dishonest. Everytime I got comfortable thinking I knew where the story was going, a wild and crazy curveball was thrown. I enjoyed that very much and it kept me on my toes. Between those insane events, things did feel a little monotonous. Stream of consciousness type books aren’t for everyone but I don’t mind them. I just can anticipate that being a point of contention for some.

As for our main character, whew. I feel so many emotions for her. She CLEARLY needs several different doctors and probably a lot of meds. But I did feel sympathy for her though. Maybe that makes me crazy but hey., what can I say? It was fun checking into her brain for a fit and seeing the dichotomy between her REAL thoughts and how she portrayed herself to those around her. The binging and emphasis on food turned me off, but that’s just a personal thing. Nothing against the book.

Hoooboy - if you are looking for a ride in a book, Creep has got you covered. Alice has been cleaning Tom's apartment for a long while now, and she knows everything about him - his smell, his favorite cornichons and wine. She has fallen deeply in love and knows that Tom will be just as struck by her once she arranges their perfect meeting. We follow Alice through Creep in her stream of consciousness as she ignores her sister, her mom, and her work and becomes more and more obsessed with Tom.

This was an excellent book, but you do need to be in the mood to be in the mind of a deeply unlikeable, unreliable narrator. It took me a bit to get through it as a result, and potentially could have been just a bit shorter since it gets to be somewhat repetitive with Alice's obsession and descent into further stalking tendencies. In addition to Alice's desired relationship with Tom, the novel explores her relationship with her body, how she feels inadequate as a paralegal and cleaner, and her jealousy of others around her.

Thank you very much to NetGalley and to Harper Perennial for the advanced copy.

This was really well written but even darker than I anticipated. I still enjoyed it, quite a bit, but the ending left a little to be desired. Still, if you like dark literary fiction and stories about obsession, this book will deliver. I can't wait for more from this author.

Creep: A Love Story comes out next week on February 25, 2025 and you can purchase HERE.

You think you know what love is, I imagine, but you don't. It's not holding hands, and feeling safe, fond smiles and tender kisses, bringing home silk-petalled flowers on a Friday, picking up that green and bone-dry wine you know He likes. I spit on that. Love is this: when it is your greatest desire to slice open His chest and crawl inside Him to rest. A compulsion to drink His blood, great copper gulps of it, to press yourself to Him, limb to limb, palm to palm, so that you might be absorbed. Burrowing inside His bones, becoming His very marrow. It is disappearing entirely into Him. This is the way I love Him, and the way He must surely love me.

I loved the premise but I just couldn't get behind the style of writing. It made it so hard to follow and took me out of the story rather easily.

What goes on in people's heads? What do the inner monologues of others sound like? What lies and affirmations do they tell themselves to get through the day? What do they obsess and ruminate over, spinning the same narrative around and around until it drives them mad?

Author Emma van Straaten can answer those questions for you, or at least in the way they relate to the rambling mind of the unhinged protagonist of her debut novel, Creep.

Alice IS a creep. She doesn't see herself that way, but we, WE can see it quite plainly. What we can also see is that Alice is unwell, which means that we are going to be spending a significant amount of time with the innermost thoughts of a deranged woman as she mulls over her latest obsession - Tom, the man whose home she cleans and for whom she has fallen madly in love.. Alice is convinced that she and Tom are destined for each other. The only problem is that they have never meant. Everything that Alice knows about Tom, she unethically gleaned from cleaning his apartment. Desperate to get closer to her "love," Alice is now resorting to interfering with Tom's life, hoping to get a chance to meet him face-to-face and prove to him that they are destined to be.

As you can imagine, this is not going to go well.

Told in a chaotic stream of consciousness style, Creep is a chilling deep dive into the every waking thought of a fanatical woman's dark and dangerous obsession. This novel is a gripping look into how the neurotic mind works, poring over every detail and moment of one's life, despairingly trying to assemble and reassemble the pieces until they mesh with one's warped perception of the world. Creep is a disorderly race to a disastrous finish, but the journey there is revelatory.

As a fan of the You series, I quite enjoy obsessive stalker stories and don't mind books that creatively take on the second person or stream of consciousness styles of writing. Creep has all three, but while many parts of this book were incredibly intriguing and mind-blowing, others were just too incoherent, winding, and verbose. Perhaps if I didn't have to work as hard to stayed rooted in this storyline, I would have very much loved this book, but as it stands, I found myself easily becoming lost unless I stayed glued to Alice's every maundering thought.

Recommended to readers who enjoy getting into the minds of unhinged characters.

Creep by Emma Van Straaten

Having a hard time landing on a rating for this one. On one hand, once I picked it up and got into the rhythm of the writing, I couldn’t look away - almost like a car crash on the side of the road. On the other hand, if I put it down, I didn’t want to pick it back up.

It was such a polarizing reading experience. It was both overwritten and felt like it was trying too hard while also striking the perfect uncomfortable tension chord. I will be honest - if I never read another menstruation description like what was in this book for as long as I live, that would be perfectly fine. I wished for more character development early on but I also 100% knew Alice was unhinged from the beginning.

This book delivered on an unhinged female main character, a stream of consciousness, over explained all thoughts style, and uncomfortable, secondhand embarrassment inducing situations.

Thanks to NetGalley and Harper Perennial for the eARC.

Unhinged female characters are not always a win for me. Unfortunately, that was the case with Creep. I never really enjoyed the book and found it hard to get through.