The Follower

by Jason Starr

In New York City's work hard, play harder singles scene, a young woman looking for love can find herself the object of a deadly obsession.

With each meaningless date and disappointing new boyfriend, Katie Porter is becoming more and more disillusioned. No matter how wide a net she casts she can't seem to find a guy who really understands her. But someone thinks she's special - very special. And he's following her... But it's not her boyfriend, Andy. The frat-boy who never grew up is too busy working out how far Katie will go and if her friends are hot, to stop and think whether Katie's 'the one'. But someone's already decided she is - and he's watching her.

Peter sees Katie at the gym. He sees her at the coffee bar she stops at on the way to work. In fact, he sees her almost everywhere, as he quietly follows her. But most of all, he sees her in his plans for the future. He's got the proposal worked out, he's even got the ring and their happy home already bought. After all, he's had enough time to plan things to perfection - he grew up in the same small town. Surely, after all these years, he can't let anything stand in his way.

Combining his trademark razor-sharp dialogue, black humor and superb storytelling talent, The Follower is Jason Starr's most suspenseful novel yet.

Genres: Thriller, Crime, Mystery, Fiction, Mystery Thriller, Suspense, Horror

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Jason Starr is the international bestselling author of many crime novels and thrillers, including Cold Caller, The Follower, The Pack and The Next Time I Die. He also writes comics for Marvel (Wolverine, The Punisher) and DC (Batman, The Avenger) and original graphic novels such as Red Border and Casual Fling. In addition, he writes film and TV tie-in novels including an official Ant-Man novel and the Gotham novels based on the hit TV show. His books have been published in sixteen languages and several of his novels are in development for film and TV. He has won the Anthony Award for mystery fiction twice, as well as a Barry Award. Starr lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Still · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although at times a tad tedious I couldn't just stop reading this thriller - I had to find out how the author was going to wrap this novel up.
It's like a black-comedy take on one of Dean Koontz's numbers.

"You think I'm a fuckin' idiot? Huh? I watch Pride and Prejudice, all right? I know what fucking love is, and I know when somebody's full of shit!"

The novel starts out with what -within a couple of chapters- will prove to be the villain being interviewed for a job as receptionist at a Manhattan gymnasium. He's an arrogant, smug detestable and highly unstable young man.
He also happens to be an incurable romantic.
His name is Peter.
Although he's quite wealthy and doesn't need the low salary job, he wants it so that he can be closer to the special girl of his dreams - Katie Porter.

Unfortunately, Katie's unaware of his existence and is seeing another young man, Andy ...a maladjusted frat-bro who's only recently out of college and living in an apartment with five other guys from his fraternity.

Andy fancies himself a pick-up artist but is woefully ill-equipped to compete with the Yale and Harvard graduates that seem to plague his very existence, out gunning his every move he makes on the chicks in bars.

One girl - Sharon or Shannon -seemed cooler than the others. Although she was really old, at least thirty-five, she didn't have that annoying, pretentious, I'm-so-much-better-than-you-because-I live-in-Alphafuck-City attitude the others had. She said she had a cousin who worked at Smith Barney and seemed unimpressed with Andy's lie that he was currently going for his MBA at NYU. Her cousin had gone to Wharton and they talked about business schools for a while, then Andy asked what she did. She said she was a film critic for some newspaper or magazine Andy had never heard of, but he figured, films, he could bullshit about that. He told her how much he loved The Lord of the Rings movies and knew most of the lines by heart, and he knew he was in for a buzz kill when she didn't seem at all impressed or interested. He asked her what kind of stuff she liked and she went off, talking about all these obscure movies with weird foreign titles. She went on and on, wouldn't shut up, and Andy just had to stand there, totally trapped, nodding his head, saying things like "Wow" and "Cool" and "I definitely gotta check that one out", as his eyes darted back and forth, trying to get someone to come over to save him from this boring as hell conversation.

When she started talking about how there was going to be this great Goddard festival next month at Lincoln Center, Andy had had enough. He interrupted whatever she was saying and said, "Excuse me," and went to the bathroom.

Now, the villain, Peter, is the exact opposite of superficial Andy. He's more the sensitive type.

He continued watching Sleepless [In Seattle] though he’d seen it more times than he could count, he never got tired of it. The first time he'd seen it, he was sixteen. He'd rented it from the video store in Lenox and loved it so much that he spent a whole weekend watching it again and again. He couldn't help crying during the scene at the end when Tom Hanks met Meg Ryan for the first time at the Empire State Building. It was the way he looked at her, with all his longing for her finally realized, that always got to Peter. There were other movies like that, ones he never got tired of watching. It was mainly the classic love stories from the eighties and nineties, like Pretty Woman, Dirty Dancing, and When Harry Met Sally, that did it for him. He liked the predictability of watching movies he'd already seen, of knowing exactly what was coming next. But it had to be a love story or a movie with romance in it. He hated violence. Seeing blood -even fake blood- was way too disturbing.

Peter has had big plans for Katie Porter for a long time... his own romance movie in his head. He's five years older than her but he knew her and her family back when he was a teenager in Lenox. He'd had a crush on her older sister ...even dated her once. But then she went away to college and wound up committing suicide.
Peter is independently wealthy and he's purchased and had renovated a lavish apartment for when he marries Katie. He has no doubts. He fully intends to marry Katie Porter because he knows once she meets him, she'll fall in love with him.
You see, he's nuts.

Instead of ordering in for dinner, Peter decided to christen the kitchen and the new stainless steel appliances. He could never even imagine trying to cook without following a recipe, so he walked to Border's on Second Avenue and bought a cookbook by Jamie Oliver, which had a recipe for pot-roasted pork with fennel and rosemary. Then he cabbed it to a Bed Bath and Beyond across town and bought the utensils he needed and on the way back to his apartment he stopped at a gourmet grocery and bought all the ingredients, and went to a wine store and bought a nice California Zinfandel. He wished his stereo was connected so he could play some music to help put him in the mood, but he had to make do by singing an off-key version of "You Light Up My Life". Although he had an awful voice, he loved to sing, especially while cooking or showering, and as far as he was concerned the love ballads from the seventies were where it was at. He also liked seventies and eighties soft rock and as a teenager lived on Barry Manilow, Air Supply, and REO Speedwagon. As with movies, he only liked music that was uplifting, that made him happy. He could never understand how people could listen to stuff like grunge or metal or -the worst- the blues. Wasn't life depressing enough?

Oh -and after completing a perfect murder, here is Peter on Hollywood:

He was in the mood to escape his life for a while, to see a good movie, but there was nothing playing in the multiplex on Third Avenue and Eleventh Street except horror, action, and comic book-based movies. He wondered why Hollywood rarely seemed to produce straight love stories anymore. What was the world coming to?

Going back through the book, pulling a few of my favorite paragraphs, I guess I enjoyed this novel a lot more than I originally thought.
It really does appear to be a lampoon of thriller authors like Koontz.
My only complaint is the length. It could have been 100 pages shorter and I'd have been delighted and given this a five-star rating.

[Hanna · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the worst books I've ever read. The writing is extremely simple and unoriginal (the german translation makes it even worse) and the story feels like it was written for a cheap TV-movie. None of the characters is likeable, due to the fact they are more cliché than one can bear. The women in the book are only interested in make-up and lipgloss, losing weight and finding "the right" boyfriend. The men are either only interested in earning a lot of money and having sex with as many good-looking women (in this case meaning very skinny girls with big tits) as possible, except for the stalking main character who is a psychopath and murderer.
Jason Starr obviously read too many Bret Easton Ellis books and tries to copy his style, utterly failing.

[Maggie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. That's all I will say. For now, at least.

So The Follower is basically what the title says. A guy...Ahem, pardon me. A crazy, lunatic, obsessed, sick, twisted, stalker follows the "love of his life" around, trying everything (and oh, I do mean everything) to make her his. Quite a crazy "thriller" this book was.

Now, I can rant about it.

The characters. Didn't like them. One guy was a sex fiend/womanizer. -cough- Andy -cough-. The other is the crazy, lunatic, etc (look at the description in the paragraph above) guy that absolutely creeped me out to no end. And it wasn't even what he did as an adult. It was what he did--and thought--about as a child, even. -shudders- I understand that the author wanted to portray them as that, though, and I guess he does recieve some credit for pulling some emotion out of his readers with those characters of his. But THEY WEREN'T REALISTIC! They were flat. Two-dimensional. UGH!

For other reasons (aside from the characters) that I cannot explain, this book got a low review. It wasn't just the characters, though. Maybe it was the plotline of it all. Perhaps it was the creepy-ness factor of it all. The writing, maybe? I don't know. I do know, however, that I didn't like this book. But...it has shown me how crazy some people in this world are, even though this book was ficton. Crazy stalker people. Can't get them out of my head now...

Rating:
60/100

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cheesy, ridiculous at times with awful, awful characters. Katie seems to hate men yet attempts to sleep with pretty much every man in the book. It’s a pretty offensive portrayal of women. All the men are ‘blokes’, who drink too much and sit around together watching porn (does anyone do that?) and everyone talks like Bill and Ted (dude, like, whatever). Could have been a lot better.

[Sarah Fulton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very inappropriate

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Katie porter is a young woman looking for love in the streets of New York, but judging by the meaningless dates and instant disasters,she starts to lose hope.Andy her patient boyfriend has been wanting to take things to the next level, after only a few weeks of dating and Katie is pressured to satisfy him and try to cope with her own decisions. Stalking her since birth, Peter Wells has already decided that Katie is the woman for him. Not only did he planned a future for them but he already has an engagement ring for them to be get married and a home they can stay in. Danger lurks in the corner as Porter slowly starts to trust Peter, not knowing that he is an obesseive man, far from the gentle man that Katie imagined. This is an amazing thriller by Jason Starr. I would be reading more books by him, considering this was my first book by him.

[DH · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a little disappointed after reading this book especially since its my first Jason Starr book. I heard he's a great author and I'll probably try to read one of his other books because I don't want to judge his writing skills based on this one book.

My biggest beef with this book is that I couldn't care less what happened to the characters. Its hard to actually like a book when the characters are not engaging and you don't care about them. I don't have a problem with flawed characters; in fact I love it when a book has flawed characters. However, the characters in this book just fell flat not to mention they were also dumb and idiotic.

What I did like about the book was how the author gave us a girl and guy's version of the same events to see how each gender would interpret the same thing differently.

[Delia · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a cliche, but for me, Jason Starr's "The Follower" was actually un-put-down-able. I read it because Bret Easton Ellis called it a masterpiece. I finished it in less than 48 hours. It's darkly funny, and shifting perspectives allow for copious dramatic irony. I love the Upper East Side setting, and Starr's skewering of post-college frat boys, AKA "walking hard ons," whose behavior makes them nearly as sinister as the stalker at the center of the story. This is a fast-paced, clever novel that will knock your socks off!

[Lois Duncan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the type of book I really get caught up in. What goes on in the head of a psychotic killer? To me, that subject is fascinating.

I didn't like a single one of the characters, so I really didn't care who got killed. But, then, that's an earmark of Jason Starr novels -- the characters are seldom likeable.

[Christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first time Jason has written a female character I really disapproved of. She wasn't realistic or complicated or in any way interesting to read about. *spoiler* And her reaction to her potential date-rape was offputting, to say the least.

Peter though, was fabulous.

[Marley Hayman · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was amazing. I'm not usually one for scary stories - especially ones I can relate to - but I couldn't put this book down. The characters were complex and the way that the story shifted from each of them gave the story a very realistic touch.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Step inside the head of a stalker....it made me cringe. Do not let your daughter/sister/mother hang out with the guys in this tale! Jason Starr's books are dark but cool...

[Miranda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was utterly unnerved throughout most of this novel. Creepy was the main atmosphere as I read along. The dialogue amongst the characters was very realistic; it helped the book move rapidly, something I desperately wanted to happen. The idea of someone like Peter existing is horrifying. I couldn't believe how delusional he was; how unbalanced he was. He let romantic movies and sappy songs infiltrate his brain, allowing him to come to the conclusion that what he was doing was something Katie actually wanted. If you're into reading books with a major creep factor going on, then I recommend this novel. The writing is great, the dialogue as I mentioned is realistic, and it really does read fast.

[ELIZABETH TIERNEY · Rating 5 out of 5]

His interior monologues are stunning! Just great.

[Jayden Leigh · Rating 1 out of 5]

has the author ever met a real person?

[Bech · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty predictable.

[katty · Rating 3 out of 5]

meh

[L · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mochte das Buch erst ab der Hälfte. Spannung kam aber leider nicht wirklich auf.

[Theresa Leone Davidson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very suspenseful novel about a stalker and his twisted way of thinking as he follows a young woman around New York, 'accidentally' bumping into her and renewing a friendship they'd had years earlier. It is a page turner, one I found difficult to put down, but its biggest minus is the characters, not one of whom, with the exception of John, a detective, is likable. In fact, in many ways it was like the television show Seinfeld (and I don't mean this as a compliment - the very few episodes I ever saw of that dumb show were inane and not particularly funny) in that the characters in the novel, just like the characters on the show, are all self absorbed dummies, without one full thought between them. They idolize wealth and glamour and easy sex and never think about anything deep or meaningful. One whole chapter, believe it or not, centers mostly around one of the supporting characters trying to get anal sex. So I revise what I said earlier: it's more like Seinfeld meets Jackass the movie, at least insofar as the characters go. The story itself, however, was good, and I'll probably try another Starr novel some time in the future.

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a chick lit author, I love any book that begins with a Jane Austen quote. Especially one that’s cleverly used, as in the opener to Jason Starr’s psychological thriller, THE FOLLOWER.

THE FOLLOWER is a dark tale about Katie Porter, and the man who stalks her, Peter Wells. Just one warning: Parents—you may never let your children move into their own apartment in Manhattan after you read this!

Starr does an excellent job of portraying single life amongst the 20-somethings living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—and then skewering it. I loved the irony of how Katie’s creepy stalker, Peter, actually has many of the things that Katie would want in a man—the expensive co-op apartment, the big bank account, and the subtle good looks. Starr is making a powerful statement about single life in New York City, what we think we want, and what we deserve to get.

I was highly entertained by this book, and you will be, too. It was the first Jason Starr novel that I’ve ever read, and I will be back to read more.

[Ray Hansel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book. My emotions got exaggerated as well. It feels like you're reading (or even watching) a movie instead of reading a book. The characters are so intense as the way the author describes it. I like also the author's courage and toughness for writing this kind of novel. It's kind of satirical and suspenseful. The only thing that I notice is that when the author narrates it, he uses a lot of profane words. It disturbs me a bit but it's still fine though. A heavy yet a quick read. Highly recommended reading most especially for yuppies!!!

[Herb Hastings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent noir novel. Starr does a remarkable job of conveying the thought processes of both a stalker and a frat boy on the prowl. As expected in this genre, all the characters are flawed and don't always behave in the most commendable ways.
The story concerns a stalker hunting down his dream girl. The story is told from each of the characters' points of view: the stalker, his prey, her sort of boyfriend, and the police officer. Starr is able to give each an authentic voice.
If you are looking for a clever page turner that also offers some insightful writing, I recommend this book.

[John Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been following Jason Starr's literary career starting with "Cold Caller"....he's the literary equivalent of film noir. Reminds me of classic hard boiled authors such as James M. Cain and Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake).

His characters are usually dark and creepy protagonists who you know are doing bad things but you can't help but keep rooting for their success. Sort of a modern day Talented Mr. Ripley.

[Sammy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good Book for Jason Starr fans. Quick reading, VERY hard to put down. Current time frame writing style is very easy to relate to. i.e. use of NYC Jargon & e-mail, etc. A bit on the graphic (sexually explicit)side, but i guess that's Jason Starr for you. Ending was ok; again, typical Jason Starr style.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been getting really into Jason Starr's books lately. I love the way he writes thrillers from multiple perspectives, so that we as the reader know everything that's going on but we're just waiting for the protagonists to put it together. I'm not going to pretend this is high literature, but it's sure fun!

[Brittany · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jason Starr's writing style is fun to read, but I felt as the plot was rushed and it seemed to get off course in some areas. I really couldn't get into the main character of Katie. Starr did do a wonderful job of describing a obsessed stalker.

[Jesse Daniel Gonzalez · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was the first book I actually read. I enjoyed it. I read about half of it, returned it to the library and months later still remembered the book and re-read it from the beginning. I've read this book a few different times.

[Ed Armstrong · Rating 4 out of 5]

An infatuation gone wrong. Murder in New York City.

[Jennifer Van horn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jason Starr never fails!! One of my faves!!

[Sandy Arsenic · Rating 3 out of 5]

as they have said