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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
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English
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THE CREEP

Michael LaPointe

Whitney Chase is a staff writer at a popular New York magazine called The Bystander. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, she's desperate to transition from profiling celebrities into covering more serious news. When a chance visit to Colorado puts her on the scent of a major scientific breakthrough, she thinks she's happened on her big break.

A young doctor named Eva Kriss claims to have discovered an artificial blood substitute - "the Holy Grail of medical science" - a white plastic concoction that she calls "the solution." In cities from Florida to California, Dr. Kriss has organized human trials, using a charity to locate test subjects from the cities' most impoverished citizens. By all appearances, the doctor has really done it - her solution will save millions of lives - but Whitney's investigation gradually reveals a terrifying deception at the heart of the story.

The lies of Dr. Kriss, however, are rivalled by Whitney's own. In her articles, the journalist has an unfortunate tendency to enhance details, invent characters, provide a more artful version. She calls it "the creep" - her slow slide toward fabrication. In Dr. Kriss and the solution, Whitney hopes she's finally found a story that needs no embellishment. But when The Bystander's fact-checker becomes unnaturally fixated on Whitney, she'll be thrust into a personal crisis that compels her to the unimaginable.

Michael LaPointe is a young Canadian journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The TLS and The Paris Review.
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Published 2021-06-01 by Random House Canada

Comments

It is so refreshing to read a novel from an author who actually seems like they were alive when they wrote it. Casually gripping and unassumingly smart, Michael LaPointe's The Creep is convincingly disguised as a thriller, but beneath the intrigue and expert plotting is something much more serious, and sad. --Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts

I stayed up all night reading The Creep and then it gave me nightmares. It's a deep, weird and uncanny tale. -- Sheila Heti, acclaimed author of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?

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