Looker

Laura Sims is the author of How Can I Help You and the critically acclaimed novel Looker, now in development for television with eOne and Emily Mortimer's King Bee Productions. An award-winning poet, Sims has published four poetry collections; her essays and poems have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Electric Lit, Gulf Coast, and more. She and her family live in New Jersey, where she works part-time as a reference librarian and hosts the library's lecture series.

"[Looker] is an ephemeral fiction with a hard landing-like a window, seen in passing, that glows and goes dark."
-The New Yorker

"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 novel disturbs because we are all, to some degree, susceptible to the bacillus of the narrator's insanity. And her symptoms may be more recognizable than we care to admit."
-Wall Street Journal

"It's easy to imagine that stars live gauzily perfect lives. But what happens when the illusion turns deadly? In Sims's creepy debut, a woman fixates on the actress living across the street, admiration tilting into pathology as events in her own life-infertility, her husband's desertion-unmask her fragility. The ultimate unreliable narrator, she reveals her instability slowly. By the end you'll be gasping."
-People Magazine

"A wicked slow-burn . . . . Looker glides toward its ending as if eagerly awaiting the discovery of something ghastly."
-Entertainment Weekly

"I loved Looker for its take on the female gaze, and its understanding of what it means for women to look at each other...this is a novel I had been craving: an unflinching portrayal of women looking upon each other as disturbingly as men do."
-The New Statesman

"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. Lookerdemands the reader look at-really gaze at, live with, and experience-dangerous obsession, but more pointedly, the societal