Review: Don’t Stand So Close To Me

by Luana Lewis (Bantam Press, R270)

Newspapers have carried warnings of an expected “wall of snow” and Stella, a psychologist and severe agoraphobic, has settled down for yet another lonely night at home.

Because of the weather, Stella’s husband, Max, also a psychologist, has decided to stay at their London flat for the night. Considering her extreme dislike for the company of others, it seems unlikely that, late at night, Stella would open her door to a waif-like teenaged girl, who demands to be admitted. But, despite her better instincts, Stella opens the door and, thereby, her life to this complicated stranger.

Big mistake.

Taking pity on the chilled teen seems to be normal behaviour, but there are very few characters, herein, who follow the norms…

What unfolds is a tense and chilling tale, delving into Stella’s work as a psychologist and slowly revealing the shocking reasons for her emotional condition.

In part, the story takes us back to two years before this night, a time when Stella, a skilled and conscientious therapist, with an open heart and everything to live for, makes her initial and traumatic mistakes. Despite, at the time, the presence of an obviously kind and caring man in her life, Stella has encountered the wrong men and made the wrong decisions. These, in turn, have led her to her current, isolated, somewhat creepy, existence.

Analysing her own situation, Stella thinks she is surviving, at the very least coping, but all is about to unravel, in a very unpleasant way.

Plenty of twists and turns make this sometimes bleak, but always gripping psychological thriller a compelling read.