My thanks to Justine Sha of Harper Collins for inviting me to join the blog tour for Fan Club by Erin Mayer. Published by Mira Books, part of Harper Collins Publishing House, out now.
In this raucous psychological thriller, a disillusioned millennial joins a cliquey fan club, only to discover that the group is bound together by something darker than devotion
Day after day our narrator searches for meaning beyond her vacuous job at a women’s lifestyle website—entering text into a computer system while she watches their beauty editor unwrap box after box of perfectly packaged bits of happiness. Then, one night at a dive bar, she hears a message in the newest single by international pop star Adriana Argento, and she is struck. Soon she loses herself to the online fandom, a community whose members feverishly track Adriana’s every move.
When a colleague notices her obsession, she’s invited to join an enigmatic group of adult Adriana superfans who call themselves the Ivies and worship her music in witchy candlelit listening parties. As the narrator becomes more entrenched in the group, she gets closer to uncovering the sinister secrets that bind them together—while simultaneously losing her grip on reality.
With caustic wit and hypnotic writing, this unsparingly critical thrill ride through millennial life examines all that is wrong in our celebrity-obsessed internet age, and how easy it is to lose yourself in it.
Our Author – Erin Mayer
Erin Mayer is a freelance writer and editor based in Maine. Her work has appeared in Business Insider, Man Repeller, Literary Hub, and others. She was previously an associate fashion and beauty editor at Bustle.com.
My Review – Fan Club
Love or hate them, cells are here to stay and social media just makes it easier to follow them. Some wannabe’s post constantly where they are, what they are doing, what they eating, who with. But most celebs, once they make the grade are very secretive about their whereabouts. And yet with paparazzi and people and their camera phones we are almost able to know their whereabouts before they even reach their destination.
Fan Club is about that kind of obsession, stalking almost. We are mobile phone obsessed, constantly wanting more, more updates, quicker delivery, but at what cost?
Our protagonist, who is never named and though not unheard of, it does make it awkward to review, unless I refer to her as ‘She‘. Becomes obsessed with Adriana Argento, she works in website creation, so can surf the net at work and quickly finds herself watching YouTube and surfing for news on her. She joins a super fan group and together their more or less worship Adriana.
At times the book has a darker premise and becomes fairly intense. Having a fairly mundane everyday life intensifies the feelings of adoration for ‘her’. And drives her to delve deeper, the fan club though has a dark side and even for the newly obsessed, its too dark.
Fan Club highlights the lengths and extremes some fans will go too. And how scary the world is becoming with eyes and ears everywhere.
#FanClub @mayer_erin #MiraBooks @HarperCollins
