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Creep

A Love Story

by Emma van Straaten

Narrator Hanako Footman

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Length 7 hours 25 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“This book is for someone who likes weird and gross and an unlikable narrator. It has themes of obsession, disordered eating, and strained mother-daughter relationships. I obsessively listened for 3 straight days and when I finished the book I was left asking "What did I just read?" ”
— Liz B • The Well-Read Moose

Bookseller recommendation

“This was like Horror ASMR. Its like one big Saltburn bathtub scene.🛁👅 *For fans of Gillian Flynn and stories about obsession.* Absolutely gorgeous. I got goosebumps from the uniquely descriptive nature of this story. The visuals are poetic and elegant while simultaneously being SICK. I found myself immediately captured and on the edge of my seat witnessing our main character Alice’s compulsive fanatical behavior. ”
— Shelby • Cavalier House Books

Bookseller recommendation

“This book is not for everyone. Luckily, I'm not everyone. This book is weird and gross. It has themes of obsession, disordered eating, and strained mother-daughter relationships. When I finished the book I was left asking "What did I just read?" Listened on Libro.fm”
— Liz • The Well-Read Moose

Bookseller recommendation

“Tauntingly smart on its absurd portrayal of female delusion in an increasingly heteropessimist dating culture. The projections and constant performance to the point of insanity and always always ending in disillusionment. The fantasy and romance is in the not knowing, the fear is in confronting the reality (the horrors of dating men).”
— Alicia • Watermark Books

Summary
About the author

""Creep is everything I want from a novel—it’s obsessive, it’s rapturous, it spirals into the most masochistic corners of the mind. A perfectly twisted debut.""—Anna Dorn, author of Perfume & Pain

""A chilling book by an exciting new voice.""—Vogue (UK)

From a blistering new voice in dark literary fiction, an unsettling portrait of loneliness, obsession, and identity which asks: if a stranger was left alone in your house, how well could they truly get to know you—enough to fall in love with you?

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 all picture perfect.

Except Alice and Tom have never met.

Alice has been cleaning Tom’s apartment every Wednesday for a year. With every smudge wiped from his coffee cup, every multivitamin counted in the jar, Alice spirals deeper into infatuation, imagining a love so powerful it might erase a lifetime of self-hatred and loneliness.

But as Alice prepares for the moment when she and Tom will finally meet face-to-face, she discovers that love might not be the cure she thought it was. Instead, the line between fantasy and reality becomes ever more blurred, shattering everything Alice thought she knew.

Told in Alice’s compelling, deliciously acidic voice, Creep is a literary study of unreliability and unlikability. Exploring alienation, class, and race, it's a skilled debut with resonance in the way that we view women, mental health, and the lost in society.

Fiction Mystery & Thriller

Emma van Straaten is a writer of British-Mauritian heritage living in London with her husband and two children. Born in Lewisham, she grew up on the Sussex coast, headed north to Durham to study English Literature, and is now happily surrounded by books working at The London Library. In 2021, she won the inaugural Women's Prize Discoveries Award with an early partial draft of Creep and has been writing whenever she can, ever since.