Joe Goldberg is going to Harvard in the fourth book of Caroline Kepnes's saga about a lovelorn stalker and murderer.
Even though Joe never went to college, he does have a bunch of life experience — between murdering his girlfriend in You, murdering a whole bunch of people in Hidden Bodies, and actually not murdering people in You Love Me, but watching a lot of folks — including his new wife — die, well, he has a lot of material. And he's turned that material into a novel — Me.
That novel got him into a small and selective writing fellowship at Harvard overseen by a famous novelist. It's a chance for Joe, the ultimate reader, to forge a career as a writer.
Joe immediately falls for one of his fellow fellows, Wonder Parish. Wonder also didn't go to college — in fact, she's a working class local who still lives with her ailing father and unpleasant sister. She's also an obsessive reader, and she and Joe quickly bond over their differences with their more privileged and educated classmates.
But Joe being Joe, things quickly get complicated, as he finds himself trying to balance his Wonder obsession with his desperate urge to make it as a writer. And before long, Joe falls into some old, murderous habits....
This novel contains examples of:
- Amateur Sleuth: Mary Beth has elements of this as a crime novelist, to the extent that she says her biggest dream is to solve a real life murder. She's eventually able to figure out that Joe is a murderer, trap him, then coax him into confessing every one of his crimes.
- And the Adventure Continues: The novel ends with Joe driving up to Maine with Mary Beth, the very clear implication being that he's going to kill her.
- Cassandra Truth: Toward the end of the novel, Joe confesses to Wonder that he killed Glenn Shoddy. She literally laughs in his face and explains that he's obviously not capable of such a thing.
- Crime Fiction: One of the writers in the fellowship, Mary Beth, is a writer of crime fiction. She's accomplished, popular and wealthy, but she has a lot of insecurity about not being considered a "real", literary writer.
- Embarrassing First Name: The Parishes had two daughters and named them "Wonder" and "Cherish." Wonder eventually reveals that they were named after a couple of pop songs from around the time they were born.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Wonder essentially accuses Joe of this when she chastises him for being fundamentally incapable of grasping that someone might be unselfish and willing to do things for other people. And she doesn't even know just how evil he is — she just thinks he's a jerk.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Once Mary Beth coaxes a confession from Joe, she doesn't turn him in — she has no interest in getting him thrown in jail or even blackmailing him. Instead, she wants him to kill her old college boyfriend. He dumped her years ago, and he's happily married to another woman (Mary Beth is also married and has two kids, not that she cares about her husband or her children), but Mary Beth still isn't over him, and she wants Joe to murder him as punishment for leaving her. Joe flatly refuses, aided by the fact that Mary Beth doesn't so much directly ask him to do it as not-so-subtly hint around it.
- Hypocrite: Glenn talks a big game in public about supporting female writers, but he unfairly trashes Wonder's writing in the workshop, and get a few drinks in him and he reveals himself to be a pretty typical sexist male writer. Oh, and it turns out that his wife actually wrote Scabies for Breakfast, the breakthrough novel he couldn't write himself and continues to take credit for (his wife is mostly cool with it, at least).
- Make It Look Like an Accident: Joe successfully kills Glenn by using wire to send him over a cliff when he's bicycling. No one seems to suspect that it's anything other than an accident.
- Plagiarism in Fiction: Joe and Wonder get into a huge fight when he accuses her of taking her "mouse in the house" metaphor from his book. She eventually admits that he was right.
- Satire: The book is partly a satire of the publishing industry and the entire culture around fiction writing.
- True Crime: A podcast called A Body in Bainbridge, which focuses on the death of a side character from You Love Me (Joe kidnapped her but didn't kill her — she committed suicide), debuts during the novel and quickly becomes an obsession among the writing group. Mary Beth becomes very obsessed, and starts peppering with Joe with questions. This, in turn, makes Joe suspicious, and he breaks into her home... where he's knocked out by a trap she had set for him.
