*Featured on Best of Lists in Vogue, People, Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple, Southern Living, and more* In this "wicked slow burn" (Entertainment Weekly) of psychological suspense from the author of How Can I Help You, a woman becomes fixated on her neighbor--the actress. Though the two women live just a few doors apart, a chasm lies between them. The actress, a celebrity with a charmed career, shares a gleaming brownstone with her handsome husband and three adorable children, while the recently separated narrator, unhappily childless and stuck in a dead-end job, lives in a run-down, three-story walk-up with her ex-husband's cat. As her fascination with her famous neighbor grows, the narrator's hold on reality begins to slip. Before long, she's collecting cast-off items from the actress's stoop and fantasizing about sleeping with the actress's husband. After a disastrous interaction with the actress at the annual block party, what began as an innocent preoccupation turns into a stunning--and irrevocable--unraveling. A riveting portrait of obsession, Looker is "a sugarcoated poison pill of psychological terror" (The Wall Street Journal) and an immersive and darkly entertaining read--"by the end you'll be gasping" (People). "In prose that moves between lyrical and caterwauling, the poet Laura Sims has pulled off the high-wire act of making bitterness delicious." -Vogue "[Looker] is an ephemeral fiction with a hard landing-like a window, seen in passing, that glows and goes dark." -The New Yorker "Sims's debut is a breathless and unrelenting portrait of one woman's unraveling." -Greer Hendricks, New York Times bestselling co-author of The Wife Between Us "An unflinching portrayal of women looking upon each other as disturbingly as men do." -The New Statesman "A perfect, dark pleasure. . . . A rare debut filled with gorgeous sentences, savory twists, and shot through with ferocious truths, this is the kind of book that can only be written by an author who is thrillingly unafraid." -Mona Awad, author of Bunny 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 It was Mrs. H who started calling her the actress, making it sound like she was one of those old Hollywood legends—Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Lauren Bacall. That may have been accurate early in her career, when she was a serious indie star, but now her fiercely sculpted, electric-blue-clad body adorns the side of nearly every city bus I see. It’s an ad for one of those stupid blockbusters—and she isn’t even the main star, she’s only the female star—so she’s a sellout, like all the rest. It’s disappointing only because she belongs to us. To our block, I mean. And here she comes—passing so close to where I sit on my stoop that I can see the tiny blue bunny rabbits embroidered on her baby’s hat. She has him strapped to her chest in that cloth contraption all the moms have. It should look ludicrous, the baby an awkward lump on the front of her white linen sundress, but somehow the actress pulls it off. She more than pulls it off—as he peers up at her she lowers her head and shakes her shoulder-length auburn hair in his face. He squeals in delight. They look like they’re being filmed right now, like they’re co-starring in a shampoo commercial, but there’s only me watching. She knows I’m sitting here but she doesn’t acknowledge me when she passes by. She just stares straight ahead with that slight smile, meant to be mysterious, I’m sure. I see your airbrushed body on the bus almost every day! I want to call out. I take a long drag on my cigarette and blow a cloud of smoke after her and the babe. * Later on, riding the subway home after my night class, I wonder about the sad sacks filling my train car. What are their twelve-hour workdays like? Full of tedium and sullen acceptance? Rage? The women’s faces have gone slack and gray by this time of night. The men’s shirts are rumpled, with sweat stains at the pits. A few reek of cigarettes and booze. There they sit, swaying and bumping in the unclean air. Does the actress ever take the subway? Maybe once in a while, to prove that she’s a regular person. But usually there’s a car outside her house, idling, waiting to whisk her anywhere she wants or needs to go. “To the park,” I imagine her saying. To the theater, to the trendy restaurant I’ve never heard of, to the Apple Store, to the apple orchard upstate. Meanwhile I sit on the stoop or shrug myself up, back and legs aching, to find my greasy MetroCard and join the tide of commoners underground. D