CAROLINE KEPNES

It’s more than a book title. It’s an uncomfortable truth that pop culture’s most flawed yet-fascinating (and highly literate) serial predators seem to understand about their appeal, whether Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter or Caroline Kepnes’ Joe Goldberg.

- John B. Valeri

YOU LOVE ME.

“I am working on the fourth You novel now and he’s so in my head that I can hear Joe saying that we are all ‘flawed’ and that Dr. Hannibal Lecter cared about Clarice and saw her strength of character,” Kepnes says, conjuring her criminally charismatic creation. Joe makes his much-anticipated return in You Love Me, following 2016’s Hidden Bodies and a hit Lifetime-to-Netflix series also called You.

“The likability for me, with a character like a Joe or a Hannibal—omigod when they are [mentioned] in the same sentence!— stems from the fact being that this guy is rooting for you,” the New York Times bestselling author says. “You being Clarice Starling, you being the intelligent woman who thinks she has met a good, bookish guy, and then, through the writing, you being the reader.”

And, in turn, audiences have lionized their favorite villains; after all, they appear to be as interested in you as you are in them.

“Hannibal wants to know about Clarice. He is a listener, a thinker, and a cannibal. Joe wants to know about the women in his life. He is a listener, a thinker, and a murderer,” Kepnes says. “Listening to someone as if they are the most important person on the planet can get a guy really far in this world.”

You may know this to be true.

A Cape Cod native and Brown University grad, she began her professional writing career as an entertainment journalist, first at Tiger Beat (“a small staff and no fact checkers”) and later Entertainment Weekly—an editorial juggernaut by comparison.