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Few debut thrillers have burrowed under the skin of modern readers quite like You. Caroline Kepnes' 2014 novel arrived with comparisons to Gone Girl, American Psycho, and Misery stamped across its jacket, and a decade on it has earned its place among the small club of psychological thrillers that genuinely feel like something new - even if it occasionally wobbles under the weight of its own ambition.

The premise is ruthlessly efficient. Joe Goldberg, a charming, well-read manager of a Lower East Side bookstore, watches a young MFA student named Guinevere Beck wander into his shop one afternoon. Within hours, he has Googled her name, scraped her social media, memorised her patterns, and begun engineering the "chance" encounters that will push her into his life. From there, the novel becomes a grim study in modern stalking, a narrative in which every tweet, text, and credit card swipe is a door left unlocked.

What elevates the book above the stalker-thriller pack is its voice. Kepnes writes the entire novel in the second person, addressed directly to Beck, and the effect is genuinely hypnotic. It is an audacious choice that by all rights should collapse under its own gimmickry, and yet it works. Joe's running monologue - snide, literate, pop-culture obsessed, occasionally funny - turns reading into a queasy act of complicity. You are not watching the stalker from a safe distance; you are riding inside his skull while he justifies himself to the woman he is hunting. That intimacy is the book's great trick, and it is what lingers long after the plot has resolved.

Joe himself is a remarkable creation. He is articulate, self-aware about his service-sector life, and capable of observations about Beck's pretentiousness and neediness that are often uncomfortably accurate. Kepnes makes the deeply uncomfortable decision to give him genuine charisma, and it pays off: the reader finds themselves rooting for him, catching themselves rooting for him, and then feeling faintly poisoned by the whole exchange. It is a reminder that charm has always been the stalker's best tool, and Kepnes wields that truth with real intelligence.

The book is not without its rough edges. At just over 420 pages, it is probably too long for what it sets out to do. Joe's bitterness and misogyny, which are the entire point, nevertheless begin to wear in the middle stretches, and the novel occasionally slackens where it should tighten. The supporting cast can feel thin by design - Peach Salinger in particular functions more as a device to redirect reader sympathy toward Joe than as a fully realised character, and the novel's willingness to caricature the people around its narrator in order to make him more palatable is its most defensible weakness. Some readers will also find the pop culture density alienating, a scrapbook of references that can date more quickly than the rest of the prose.

None of this dampens the central accomplishment. You is a cautionary tale dressed up as a love story, a novel that uses the texture of contemporary digital life - the casual googling, the passive surveillance, the public Twitter account - to argue that we have quietly made ourselves legible to anyone willing to look. The discomfort it leaves behind is not cheap shock but something more useful: a quiet audit of how much of yourself you have handed over without noticing.

It is imperfect, occasionally bloated, and morally slippery in ways that will not suit every reader. It is also one of the most genuinely original thrillers of the last decade, and worth the unease it earns.