Podcast Summary: New Books Network - Paula Bomer, "The Stalker" (Soho Books, 2025)

Date: November 12, 2025
Host: Chris Holmes
Guest: Paula Bomer
Episode Theme:
An in-depth conversation with author Paula Bomer about her new novel The Stalker, exploring the creation and complexity of her disturbing protagonist, the dynamics of violence against women, literary devices such as narrative voice and black humor, as well as cultural and societal contexts that enable such characters to thrive.

Main Theme Overview

The episode delves into Paula Bomer's latest novel, The Stalker, a darkly comic and deeply unsettling portrayal of a young man, Dodie, who manipulates, stalks, and abuses women to sustain his own privilege and avoid personal hardship. The conversation explores the crafting of Dodie’s narrative voice, the implications of violence, empathy, class dynamics, the challenges and uses of dark humor, and the wider cultural systems that allow such figures—recognized disturbingly often in real life—to persist.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Novel's Narrative Voice and Character Conception

• Reading from Chapter One: Bomer reads the unsettling, intimate opening that immerses the listener in Dodie’s gaze and the toxic dynamic between privilege and manipulation.

  • [04:25] Paula Bomer:

    “Beata was coarse. She was low class, tough, which made her masculine. She had the hair of a baby or an old woman... Dodie had a plan for her. Any of the three boys at the table would have gladly fucked her. But Beata was out of reach for Stanny and Lou. Not because she was above them, she was clearly beneath them, but because fucking Beata required a plan...”

• Choosing Narrative Perspective:

  • [07:43] Chris Holmes commends how the third-person voice is "tied tightly" to Dodie, making readers feel unable to escape his interior world.
  • [08:21] Paula Bomer reflects:

    “His voice came to me and I don’t really like to write in first person that often... Third person gives you a little bit of room to kind of go in and out of point of view... but it’s very close to Dodie.”
    She explains how initially attempting to write a "victim’s" narrative, she switched perspective for greater narrative energy and flow.

• Humanizing Versus Mythologizing Dodie:

  • [10:48] Bomer initially imagined Dodie as “Satan or the devil himself,” but under her editor's guidance, humanized him:

    “It was kind of hard to keep up the Satan thing... We humanized him. I think the most human thing about him... is his background. Later he goes to Boston College, his mother’s Catholicism is emphasized, and the early good versus evil allegory was cut back.”

2. Empathy, Momentum, and the Reader’s Experience

• Empathy’s Role and Its Limits:

  • [13:41] Holmes notes the longstanding debate about whether novels generate empathy or its opposite.
  • [13:53] Bomer draws on literary precedents (e.g., American Psycho, The Dwarf by Pär Lagerkvist) to illustrate how compelling yet repulsive protagonists maintain momentum without soliciting sympathy:

    “No one really feels sorry for Patrick Bateman... It’s a meditation on delusion, power, corruption...”

  • [16:03] Holmes adds Lolita as another example, for the way humor and narrative try to "win us over" to despicable figures.

• On Maintaining Narrative Drive:

  • [16:46] Bomer:

    “I care about momentum... I like to figure out, okay, what can I do to make this move? I knew I wanted it to get worse... And what—you know, it does.”
    She discusses surprising herself as a writer, which translates to reader surprise.

3. Gendered and Economic Violence

• Violence Against Women—Contextualizing the Novel’s Relevance:

  • [18:37] Holmes and Bomer agree that The Stalker is centrally about violence against women.
  • [18:37] Bomer states:

    “A woman is most likely to be murdered at home... That’s where he goes, he goes into women’s homes... I did not write this book expecting Trump to be elected again, but for the first time, my book is timely... He is a convicted rapist and he’s leading our country. That just says a lot about how much we don’t care about women.”

  • [21:01] She praises the #MeToo movement but laments backlash and the generational cycle of taking progress for granted.
  • [22:47] Bomer:

    “Men like to be violent toward women. It’s just a fact.”

• Class and Economic Parasite Dynamics:

  • [23:05] Holmes draws parallels to American Psycho, noting Dodie’s reliance on women for survival as his family’s wealth disappears.
  • [23:36] Bomer:

    “His entitlement is based on his heritage... He just feels completely entitled to take advantage of anybody... Domestic labor that women provide... has not changed very much.”
    She underscores the domestic setting as a site of parasitic, psychological violence.

• Stillness as Violence:

  • [25:28] Bomer:

    “That was a real goal, was to show the violence of stillness... If someone just sits there and stays... you could be just asking for trouble, you know, it’s just a sad truth.”
    She references The Gift of Fear and classic war strategies (Art of War, Marcus Aurelius) to connect stillness and non-action to forms of exerting power and inflicting harm.

  • [27:21] Holmes calls "never doing anything" one of the most horrifying aspects.
  • [28:58] Bomer:

    "Women, just by being women, are vulnerable... Stillness, that's a war strategy. That's a strategy that is in ancient war manuals."

  • [29:36] Bomer links these tactics to domestic violence, reinforcing the overlap of ancient male-dominated power structures and contemporary abuse.

4. Black Humor and Emotional Complexity

• Humor as Narrative Strategy:
  • [29:58] Holmes notes the novel’s pain and darkness are leavened with striking black humor, much of it unintentional from Dodie.
  • [30:35] Bomer:

    “Humor and darkness are twins. They go very well together... I revise heavily... I started getting very upset. The revisions... refining it all, and I was left with a very... Yeah, I’m so... I’m excited to move on to another book... But humor and darkness go very well together.”

  • She references The Vet’s Daughter as an example of a novel that's dark yet lightless—unusually so.

5. Society and Systems: Individual and Structural Enablers

• Individual Monstrosity & Societal License:
  • [33:14] Holmes asks about the interplay between Dodie's personal evil and societal permission.
  • [33:31] Bomer:

    “He’s an individual, but he’s part of the world and the world... from my childhood, you know, boys will be boys... We’ve always let boys get away with things... Women, if they fight back, they’re considered bitches... I... noticed that boys were free and I wanted to be free like them very early on... In the home... between a husband and wife, there was no marital rape until 1992. So it’s deeply ingrained legally.”

  • [35:25] She links patriarchal and capitalist control to the exploitation of poor and women.

6. Book Recommendations & Literary Influences

• Literary Comparisons and Inspirations:
  • [13:53, 14:22] Bomer references American Psycho, The Dwarf, and The Man Who Loved Children as influential for building unsympathetic protagonists.
  • [36:34] Bomer is currently reading Chris Kraus’s new book The Four Spent the Day Together, praising its exploration of class and addiction—also elements in The Stalker.
  • [37:17] She recommends Stephanie Wambugo’s Lonely Crowds, Barbara Comyns’s The Vet’s Daughter, and Michael Clune’s memoir Whiteout.
  • [38:17] Bomer:

    “It’s Baltimore in the 90s and he has a terrible heroin problem... It’s really so exquisitely painful and beautiful at the same time because unlike Dodie... you have a lot of compassion for [the memoirist].”

Notable Quotes and Moments

• On Voice and Point of View
  • [08:21] Paula Bomer:

    “Once you find a voice, even if it’s... has that distance from third person, third person has a voice in it as well.”

• On Empathy and Antiheroes
  • [13:41] Chris Holmes:

    “Novels are often pitched by people in my world, like theorists... as generators of empathy. But the long history of antagonistic, even despicable narrators would argue that there’s something to empathy’s negation in the novel.”

• On Humor and Darkness
  • [30:35] Paula Bomer:

    “Humor and darkness are twins. They go very well together.”

• On Stillness as Violence
  • [25:28] Paula Bomer:

    “That was a real goal, was to show that the violence of stillness.”

• On Societal Structure and Male Privilege
  • [33:31] Paula Bomer:

    “He’s an individual, but he’s part of the world and the world... We’ve always let boys get away with things.”

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [04:25] Paula Bomer reads from Chapter One of The Stalker, showcasing the visceral narrative voice.
• [08:21] Discussion of narrative choice—third person close versus first person.
• [10:48] Origin of Dodie’s character—devil as metaphor, later humanized by editorial intervention.
• [13:41–16:46] Exploration of empathy, literary influences for antihero narratives.
• [18:37–23:00] Violence against women, #MeToo movement, and societal complicity.
• [23:05–28:58] Economic violence, class, neglect, and the “violence of stillness.”
• [29:58–32:14] The necessity and function of dark humor in the novel.
• [33:14–35:25] Systems and structures enabling male violence and power.
• [35:39–38:40] Paula Bomer’s book recommendations and literary influences.

Tone and Language

The episode maintains a serious, nuanced, and deeply analytical tone, marked by Bomer’s candor, intellect, and dark wit, mirroring the novel’s style. Conversations veer between craft talk, literary history, cultural critique, and moments of wry, self-aware humor.

Conclusion

This episode is a comprehensive, candid examination of The Stalker and its unsettling, timely themes. Paula Bomer and Chris Holmes explore how narrative voice, humor, and structure combine to create a portrait of male privilege and violence that is disturbingly familiar. Rich in literary context and laced with sharp insights into contemporary society, the conversation will interest anyone drawn to dark fiction, narrative technique, and the intersection of literature and gender politics.

Highly recommended for listeners interested in:

• Literary craft
• Dark humor
• Gender and violence in fiction
• The power of narrative perspective
• Contemporary cultural critique