Number One Fan by Meg Elison

Dates Read: September 26, 2023 – September 26, 2023
Date Published: August 30, 2022
Source: Borrowed paperback

Goodreads — Amazon

I was not this book’s number-one fan.

It was a book. It was just kind of… ridiculous. Not only that but I couldn’t help but find several callbacks to Misery by Stephen King. It just felt like a rehash of a story that I didn’t think needed to be rehashed. I don’t know. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mindset for this one at the time but… I just didn’t like Eli, the FMC. And maybe that was the point. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to connect with either of the characters. The author certainly didn’t make her likable and there was a bit of a takeaway from both of them being completely unlikeable characters.

I just didn’t even feel sorry for her even towards the end. Not even at all. And she underwent some pretty gruesome punishments.

So, Leonard poses as Eli’s Uber driver. He drugs her and takes her back to his home where he ties her up in a bedroom and holds her hostage. She is to follow his rules or she is to be punished. Homegirl is NOT a rule follower we come to find out. Leonard is obsessed with Eli’s books and wants her to play the part of the main character. How far will she go to stay alive and how sloppy will he get leaving room for her to mount an escape?

This book was just creepy and brutal and annoying. The FMC did things that I was sitting there thinking, “OK, seriously?” Some of the things she said… she just… I don’t know. She irked me. Maybe that’s why it was so hard for me to get into it.

If you’re looking for a book where you don’t connect with any characters and there’s no one to root for and you enjoy watching someone pee all over herself just to be a pain in the ass and make other extremely questionable choices while being punished rather brutally by a captor, this might very well be the book for you. It just wasn’t for me.

TW: there are some quite graphic and gruesome scenes in this book. If you’re squeamish, it might be best to stay away from this one.