Acclaimed thriller author Laura Sims' previous novel, HOW CAN I HELP YOU, was a New York Times Best Thriller of the Year. Now, in THE MAN, she weaves a tale of parallel paranoia, obsession and craft.

“To the everyday observer, Judith Stanley would have seemed like an average woman: a housewife, a mother, and the unassuming resident of a suburban New Jersey town.” But beneath this facade hides a gifted photographer, a woman capable of turning an empty-nester hobby into not just a career, but a legacy. 

Still learning to settle into her life without the trappings of parenthood, 1960s housewife Judith Stanley has begun taking a photography class at the local college. She is studying under Paul Sorenson, a handsome and charming professor whose one-time brush with fame has left him hungry for more. Though Judith is older and meeker than her fellow classmates, when she shows her latest work to Paul, he is captivated. She has “it,” he tells her --- that intangible, seemingly boundless talent that could elevate her to the likes of Harper’s Bazaar spreads and gallery showings. There’s just one problem: Judith has no interest whatsoever in publishing her work.

"Inventive, bold and deeply unsettling, THE MAN reads like a Hitchcock thriller about power and obsession, but with a feminist bent that feels refreshingly modern and urgent."

Sims invites us into Judith's daily walks and experiments with her camera. Whether she is photographing lovers meeting on a park bench, a crying girl in the crowd of a parade, or even her own face, reflected back at her in the windowpane of a liquor store, Judith has a knack for capturing light and balance, poignant meaning and universal truths.

But no matter where Judith takes a self-portrait, there is always the smudge of a shadow lurking behind her, the silhouette of what undoubtedly is a man. This would be terrifying enough for any woman who has ever read a newspaper or watched a chyron. But for Judith the discovery is even more harrowing, as she once was the target of a vicious sexual assault that left her scarred, petrified and ostracized from her small community, where she already was an outsider due to her status as an orphan and her neglectful grandmother. In the years since her attack, Judith has fought to both remember and forget the details. Part of that has meant concealing the entire story from her husband, Tom.

Tom loves Judith, but because of her unwillingness to tell him everything about the darkest time in her life, he doesn’t always get her. But Paul does. As she continues to share her work with him, she embarks on something of a one-sided emotional affair, seeking validation from Paul while concealing the extent of her budding hobby from Tom. Paired with the creeping sense that she is being watched, this triangle of sorts --- and all its secrets --- begins to fracture her psyche. And then the calls begin. 

Now, Judith is certain that the man who appears in her photos; the man who calls her, never speaking, only breathing; and the man who attacked her in her youth are one and the same. But with Paul encouraging her to spend more and more time on her photography, putting her in dangerous situations, it becomes impossible to hide from the man. At the same time, Paul’s overtures about her work have become aggressive, even angry. Tom’s disapproval of her hobby has grown, leaving her increasingly isolated, paranoid, and feeling as if she has a target on her back. And then, finally, the man emerges from the shadows.

The book’s second half is told from Paul's perspective. Having already witnessed the collapse of his career, Paul becomes certain that Judith is his ticket back to fame, with his single-minded obsession mirroring her paranoia. When he convinces the entire Stanley family to allow him to begin selling her work to magazines and galleries, it seems that Judith’s fame will save them all. And then the hate mail begins.

Pairing the parallel, paranoid perspectives of Judith (meek yet innovative) and Paul (talented but self-absorbed), Laura Sims destabilizes her audience, forcing us to descend into fractured psyches and madness right along with her suffering characters, even when we can see the writing on the wall that we have gone too far. In this way, she employs her razor-sharp character studies as narrative fuel, allowing the overwhelmingly dread-inducing tone of her prose to slowly envelop us as we follow not just the mystery of the man, but what is really going on in Judith’s head (and later Paul’s). 

The result would be smothering or overwritten in a less capable writer’s hands, but Sims is at the top of her game in her third novel. She masterfully controls every reveal, upending our expectations and confronting complex questions all at the same time. Woven into this exploration of art and ownership is the timely theme of the role of women in art --- as muse, as the exploited, and as the ultimate creator. 

Inventive, bold and deeply unsettling, THE MAN reads like a Hitchcock thriller about power and obsession, but with a feminist bent that feels refreshingly modern and urgent. Unique in its form and structure, it won’t appeal to strict mystery readers. But lovers of cerebral, psychological thrillers and fans of Mona Awad and Tara Isabella Burton will find their next auto-buy author here.