You was first published in 2014, as a stomach-churning second-person narrative designed to make the reader feel like Beck through forced perspective in which Joe attempts to convince you that everything he does is all for you a second novel, Hidden Bodies, was published in 2016. He’s “holier than thou,” Kepnes points out, and operates from a moral code that allows him to believe he’s doing people favors by killing them. He is quick to judge and even quicker to condemn, and pities the people in Beck’s life whose standards for living he doesn’t agree with. “He feels like he has really bad luck,” Kepnes offers of her villain, who operates under the rock-solid belief that everything he does-the stalking, the gaslighting, the murdering-is for some greater good. And yes, along the way, he kills people: a trust-fund bro Beck was sleeping with a best friend he believes was secretly in love with her. He begins to follow her, thinking that he is her protector, all the while talking to her in an inner monologue. Her name is Guinevere, but she goes by Beck, and Joe interprets light flirtation as irrefutable truth that she came to find him-that the book was an excuse that their encounter was love at first sight, rather than one of the millions of random encounters people have throughout their lifetimes. The “he” is Joe Goldberg, a 20-something bookstore manager from Brooklyn who begins obsessing over a grad student who walks into his shop one day to buy a novel. That’s what people are going to say he is.” He just killed a few different people.’ She asked, ‘Do you hear yourself?’ And I realized, Oh, God. “I remember finishing and my friend told me, ‘I can’t believe you wrote about a serial killer.’ I was like, ‘No, I didn’t.

“I never used that phrase the whole time that I was writing,” she says firmly over coffee on a crisp Friday afternoon. Caroline Kepnes did not think she was writing a book about a serial killer until after she finished You.

You caroline kepnes series