YOU FIRST

What makes a serial killer a serial killer? Here’s the rom-com version.

This is Kepnes’ fifth novel about murderer, hopeless romantic, and colossally unreliable narrator Joe Goldberg, but it’s the first prequel, recounting Joe’s experiences as a 17-year-old in New York City not long after 9/11. Even at that tender age he sees books and sex as inextricably linked—he calls his penis “Portnoy.” Like the other books (which became a five-season Netflix series), this one takes us inside Joe’s head, where he addresses a running commentary to a “you” that’s not the reader but a woman he’s fallen madly in love with, which in Joe’s case means he’s stalking her. This time it’s Vail Gunderson, a classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl with the most early-2000s job ever: She’s a production assistant on Sex and the City. She’s obsessed with the show and with rom-coms in general, and Joe, who practices obsession as an art, follows right along. Their relationship plays out amid a cast of sometimes wacky, sometimes disturbing characters, including Mr. Mooney, the bookstore owner who employs Joe and occasionally locks him in the basement; Angus Kaplan, a wealthy Mooney client and frustrated writer who buys pricey signed volumes by authors he envies and then desecrates them, often with Joe as an audience; and the aptly named Dick, a barista friend of Vail’s who offers Joe lots of bro-style advice. Kepnes’ trademark dark humor peppers the book, and there are some surprising twists. But the true twisted charm of the earlier installments was Joe’s unrestrained interior monologue. This time around it too often falls flat; maybe it’s because young Joe seems not quite as ferocious as the fully formed version, or maybe it’s that we’ve entered an era when narcissistic, amoral rambling seems overdone.

This prequel offers entertainment for fans, but killer Joe Goldberg might have overstayed his welcome.