I used to be a stalker.
In college, I chose my study spots on the campus green so I’d have a direct line of sight to my crush’s dorm. A few years later, I pored over my work crush’s Facebook page, analyzing whether the woman he held close in a photo looked more like a sister or significant other. And sometimes, when that crush was in the break room, I made excuses to linger there too, washing out my mug so long my fingers nearly pruned—all to keep myself in his line of sight.
This might be why it wasn’t a huge leap for me in my latest novel, Cross My Heart, to write a female character who engages in some stalking of her own—though, unlike my protagonist, Rosie, I’ve never stood outside a crush’s house at night, tracking him as he moves through the rooms. In fact, Rosie crosses all sorts of lines I never did, because her crush just happens to be the husband of her heart donor, a man she feels fated to meet, to fall in love with—no matter what she discovers as she scrutinizes his past and present.
I’m certainly not the first to center a book around a female stalker. In the riveting Just One Look by Lindsay Cameron, a woman gains access to her coworker’s emails, obsesses over his seemingly perfect marriage—and becomes determined to take his wife’s place. Sarah Zachrich Jeng’s When I’m Her, a STEMinist delight best described as “Freaky Friday but make it a thriller,” features a protagonist who watches and memorizes every aspect of her former best friend’s life so she can literally switch bodies with her. And in the voicey and addictive Looker by Laura Sims, a woman begins to lose her grip on reality when she stalks a famous actress—who’s also her neighbor.
These obsessive female characters have been popping up more and more in recent years, and one reason might just be the relatability factor. In fact, the reason I was so willing to write about my own instances of stalking at the beginning of this piece is because I’m confident I’m not the only woman who’s engaged in such behavior. Still, for most of us, keeping our eyes peeled for any sight of our crush, or investigating them on social media, is as far as we’ll go—which is why it’s so thrilling to follow a character who pushes the boundaries, who leans toward the extremes, who allows herself to act in ways we’d never let ourselves. “It’s like getting a peek into what might happen if we gave in to our most intrusive thoughts and desires,” says bookstagrammer Kayla of @kayreadwhat. “It’s a way to understand those raw, unfiltered impulses that drive us all.”
At the risk of sounding a bit too unfiltered myself, there’s something almost aspirational about a stalker character. Briana of @brianas_best_reads says she loves “characters who are bold enough to take matters into their own hands—for better or worse. They’re compelling because they exude a level of confidence I can only imagine having.” In Cross My Heart, Rosie isn’t exactly confident; she’s frequently anxious about being perceived as “too much”—a phrase that more than one ex-boyfriend has ascribed to her—but every time she tries to put a lid on her enthusiasm, the intensity of her emotions boils over anyway. In short, she’s a mess, and in our society, messiness is not a characteristic to be celebrated in a woman. But when we read stalker-ish characters like Rosie, we get to watch women stray outside the lines, muck things up—in their own lives and others’—which can often scratch an itch for female readers that, in real life, they’ve been conditioned to ignore.
Then there’s the power of it all. In crime fiction, there’s no shortage of female victims, whether they’re murdered, abducted, or forced to endure some other act of violence. This, of course, reflects the stark dangers that exist for women off the page, especially at the hands of men, and it’s important to shed light on those realities. But it’s just as important for readers to see that power dynamic flipped, to watch the woman become the danger instead of the endangered, to see the default male gaze swapped out for, in the case of stalkers, a literal female gaze. Sure, she’s got her eyes on someone who has no idea they’re being watched—her actions aren’t exactly ethical—but these days, our newsfeeds are clogged with stories of men behaving unethically, often with little to no consequences. While the #MeToo movement was a public reckoning that saw serial abusers like Harvey Weinstein finally held accountable, it was only four years after he was tried for his crimes that Weinstein saw his conviction overturned—not because of new evidence exonerating him, but because of a technicality: during the trial, the judge had allowed the testimony of women whose experiences with Weinstein predated the charges. In other words, there had been too much evidence of his crimes.
Coming on the heels of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, this felt like another devastating blow to the decades of progress women have made, causing them to be more attuned than ever to the erosion of their rights and agency, and to the male-dominated groups making decisions about their lives and bodies. It’s understandable, then, that readers would find satisfaction in stories where female characters do exactly what they want, consequences and controversies be damned—just like so many men. For Gare of @gareindeedreads, it’s precisely the power-abusing men that make a female stalker character so irresistible. “You may not agree with her actions and behavior,” he says, but often it’s clear: “if it weren’t for the actions of a man, none of this would’ve happened.”
Plus, he adds, “Women are smarter than men,” and what better way to showcase that than with a character who’s at her most calculated and cunning?
Ultimately, though, whether you’re in it for the vicarious thrill or the feminist slant of it all, crime novels featuring female stalkers are just plain fun. Of course, it’s no surprise I would say that, having written one and having been a benign stalker myself, so don’t take it from me. Take it from Kendall of @sunflower_book_lover, who’s read plenty of books that use this trope: “These stories are wild and unhinged and oh so good. I’m obsessed with and addicted to the crazy ride!”
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