Pip: Welcome to osoparavos.com, where the reading is never quite what the cover suggests — and today the cover has pride flags on it for a reason.
Mara: We have one substantial piece to work through today, from Adam Donaldson Powell — a novella called “the stalker,” subtitled “a gender-bender,” published with its full critical introduction and complete text. It covers identity in flux, obsession turned inward, and what love looks like when nobody’s definition of self stays fixed.
Pip: So: a thriller where the real antagonist is the mirror. Let’s start with what the novella is actually doing.
Identity as Pursuit, Not Destination
Mara: The introductory essay frames the novella’s central argument right away: this is a work about the instability of selfhood, built around Rachel and her transgender lover Angélique, both of whom are, as the introduction puts it, “exploring lesbianism” while Angélique’s identity “remains fluid and contested.”
Pip: The title does a lot of work here — and not the work you’d expect from a thriller.
Mara: Exactly. The introduction makes that explicit: “Rather than presenting gender transition as a resolution, Powell frames it as an ongoing, perhaps irresolvable process. Identity, Powell suggests, is not a destination but a perpetual negotiation.”
Mara: What that means in practice is that nobody in this story arrives anywhere. Angélique moves through hormone therapy, cross-dressing, lesbian community, and a marriage proposal — and the text treats each stage as a waypoint, not a finish line. Rachel, meanwhile, cycles through alter egos — Veronica, Emily — who act on her behalf when she can’t.
Pip: Which is where the thriller machinery kicks in, quietly. The stalker of the title turns out to be internal — each character pursuing a version of themselves they can’t quite inhabit.
Mara: The introduction names that directly: “stalking becomes an inward act.” The external plot — anonymous roses, threatening notes, a mystery sender — runs alongside this, but the real menace, as the essay puts it, is “self-alienation and the inability to reconcile desire with identity.”
Pip: And the roses turn out to be from Emily. The alter ego. The stalker was inside the whole time — which is either deeply literary or the most efficient plot twist in Worcester, Massachusetts history.
Mara: The novella earns it, though. Emily’s chapters make her logic clear: she believes love relationships cause only pain, and she’s been intervening since Rachel was a child — hiding in closets, tearing the heads off dolls, eventually attacking a priest and Todd in a single afternoon. Her violence is protective, in her own framework.
Pip: A framework that is, to be fair, not entirely without evidence given what happens with Father Samuel in chapter one.
Mara: That scene establishes Rachel’s foundational trauma — a near-assault that triggers her first full dissociative break, the emergence of Emily as a separate voice. The novella traces everything forward from that moment: Rachel’s lesbianism, her distrust of men, her alter egos’ competing agendas.
Pip: Todd gets his own chapters too, which is a structural choice worth noting — his therapy sessions, his misogynistic internal monologue, his slow and grudging self-examination. He’s not redeemed so much as incrementally less awful.
Mara: The introduction flags the stylistic tension honestly: Powell’s background as a poet produces “startling juxtaposition of images” and “pure literary pleasure,” but the same density can distance the reader from emotional stakes. The prose draws attention to itself even in the most charged scenes.
Pip: Though the poem Angélique leaves on the pillow — “In the guises of feminism and masculinity, we paced and stalked definition with the cunning of a mother lion” — lands cleanly. That one earns its lyricism.
Mara: The epilogue resolves everything with deliberate warmth: Rachel and Angélique married, a daughter named Michelle, Todd paired with a Latina shemale named Esmeralda, Rachel’s estranged mother reconciled at the birthday party. It’s traditional in shape, the text acknowledges that directly, but it’s what the characters can sustain.
Pip: The last line is “the party still has not ended” — which, after everything Emily put everyone through, feels genuinely hard-won.
Mara: The novella’s lasting argument is that identity and love are both perpetually unfinished — and that the people around you have to be willing to meet all of who you are, not just the version that shows up at the door.
Pip: Next time, we’ll see what else is waiting on the site. Bring your patience for complexity.
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