For You and Only You (Vibes, Not Spoilers)

For You and Only You is the newest thriller in Caroline Kepnes’ You series, about Joe Goldberg, that deeply twisted unreliable narrator, who just wants to find true love, even if that means a disturbingly high body count.  He just has no choice but to murder anyone who interferes with his love life.

This is a thriller where the twists really make the book, so I’m just going to talk about the vibes, not about any actual plot events that could spoil it.

The reason these You novels work for me is that even while Joe is, you know, an unhinged serial killer, he makes relatable observations.  Here, he’s in Cambridge on a Harvard writing fellowship, and his comments on MFA posturing and Boston namedropping are so real. SO REAL. There were some fiction blowhards in this book who could all die and it would be fine with me.

I knew the format was going to be Joe manipulating and murdering his way into his beloved’s life, and as usual, the tension comes from whether Joe’s coldhearted quick thinking will win, or if he’ll eventually get caught, perhaps with a tiny careless mistakes. By this point in the series, I was sort of wondering if anyone would notice the string of disappearances and mysterious deaths in Joe’s past. The book doesn’t disappoint, with more of angsty, murderous Joe killing his way to true love.

Still, overall I didn’t love this one because there are too many long speeches about writing and genius, and I was on Team Nobody. I would have been OK if Joe decided to off the entire cohort of writers and teachers, just to put an end to the monologuing on Fiction and Art and Creativity.  I found myself skimming, which didn’t happen to me in the earlier books, and I was reading this eARC on a long train ride, so it’s not like I had anything distracting me. This skimming might just be me, because the sections on writing and creative power and process also gave me eyerolls in The Writing Retreat (and ALSO gave me eyerolls every time I was assigned a process book for my real MFA). So let me know how you feel when you read this one.