The term was invented in 1956, for television. Two sociologists noticed that audiences were forming real attachments to people on screen who could not form one back, and gave the arrangement a name. Seventy years later the arrangement is the water we swim in: you know a stranger's dog's name, their divorce, their opinion on a film you haven't seen, and they do not know you exist. Books about parasocial relationships have quietly become one of the more useful things fiction is doing, because the feeling is now completely ordinary and almost nobody talks about it honestly.
The obvious version is the obsessed fan with a hammer. That's the loud branch, and there are three excellent examples below. But the more interesting novels come at it sideways — from inside the famous person, from inside the performance, from inside a relationship where one party is a machine and the other knows it. Eleven books, split into the two directions the idea runs.
The fan and the famous
Misery — Stephen King
Paul Sheldon crashes his car in a Colorado snowstorm and is pulled out by Annie Wilkes, a former nurse who lives alone, and who happens to be his number one fan. She has read everything. She knows the books better than he does. She has views about what he owes the character he was tired enough of to kill off, and she is in a position to collect.
What makes it the founding text rather than just the most famous one is that King refuses to make Annie's love fake. She isn't pretending to care about the work in order to trap him — she genuinely cares about it, more than he does, and that is precisely the problem. Her claim on him is built from thousands of hours of real attention, freely given, and she has done the maths on what that ought to entitle her to. Every novel below is arguing with this book whether it means to or not.
It was published in 1987, with no internet anywhere in it. Worth remembering when people talk about this as a modern condition.
Number One Fan — Meg Elison
Eli Grey, a bestselling fantasy novelist, gets into a rideshare outside an airport and wakes up in a basement. Her captor is a reader, and he has a thesis: the books she wrote are not really hers, she has been an unworthy custodian of them, and he is here to correct the record.
Elison updates Misery for the era of the author who is expected to be permanently available — the panel, the signing queue, the DMs, the constant low-level obligation to be accessible to people who bought a paperback. The novel is sharpest on the way that obligation is enforced by ordinary people with ordinary manners, long before anyone locks a door. Nastier and funnier than it needs to be, and very short on comfort.
You — Caroline Kepnes
Joe Goldberg manages a bookshop in New York. A woman called Beck buys a book, and by the end of the afternoon he has her full name, her neighbourhood, her circle, her insecurities and her schedule, assembled entirely from things she published herself.
The second person narration gets the attention, but the real achievement is how boring the surveillance is. There's no hacking, no genius, no montage. Joe simply reads what's there and pays closer attention than any human being was ever meant to receive, and Kepnes makes the horrible point that this is not a superpower — it's what everyone can do to anyone now, and mostly chooses not to. The gap between Joe and a normal person who has looked someone up at two in the morning is one of degree, and the book knows exactly how uncomfortable that is.
Cold Heart October — Adam Eccles
In June 1994, a nineteen-year-old Mick Grady stepped in for a cancelled support act at Whelan's in Dublin and started to sing, and the room changed. Not metaphorically. His voice does something to people that nobody has ever explained — euphoria, release, the sense of having been briefly and completely understood. It made the band. It also made every person in every room feel they had been given something personally.
Thirty years on, Mick is nearly fifty and hiding in his late mother's cottage in a village in County Clare, unable to write since the death of Donal Lynch, the friend who wrote the songs. The novel is unusually clear-eyed about what a lifetime of that kind of devotion costs. His marriage to a supermodel ended because she was addicted to the voice rather than in love with the man — which is the parasocial bond stated in its purest form, and the only book on this list to put it that plainly. Meanwhile Siofra Wilde, a paranormal investigator with a YouTube channel and a cancellation crisis of her own, comes looking for him because his voice is the undeniable story that might save her career. She has an audience with a claim on her, too.
It is literary fiction with exactly one impossible thing in it, and it uses that one thing to ask what you owe people who love you for an effect you happen to produce. The answer is not comfortable, and it isn't tidy. Adam Eccles's tenth novel, and the one that goes deepest.
Idol — Louise O'Neill
Samantha Miller is a wellness guru with a large, devoted following built on radical honesty about her own life. Then she publishes an essay about a formative night with a childhood friend, it goes viral, and the friend reads it and remembers the night entirely differently.
O'Neill is excellent on the economics underneath: an audience that has been trained to expect confession will keep needing more of it, and the supply has to come from somewhere. Samantha's followers believe they know her because she has told them things, and she has told them things because that is the product. When the account of the past is contested, the audience has to decide whose version it owns — and that turns out to be a business decision as much as a moral one. Irish, cold, extremely well constructed.
Being known by strangers
No One Is Talking About This — Patricia Lockwood
The unnamed narrator is internet-famous for a single stupid post and now travels the world giving talks about the portal, which is Lockwood's word for the place we all live. The first half is written in fragments, in the exact rhythm of scrolling, and it is much funnier than that description suggests.
Then a family emergency arrives, and the book changes register completely. What's left is a question the novel doesn't answer: after years of processing everything through an audience of strangers who feel like company, what do you actually have when something happens that cannot be posted? The two halves are doing something more precise than contrast. The first half earns the second.
Fake Accounts — Lauren Oyler
A woman goes through her boyfriend's phone and discovers that he runs a popular anonymous conspiracy account. She has been in a relationship with a man whose real intimacy — the daily, disclosing, attentive kind — has been going to an audience of strangers under another name.
Oyler then does something clever and slightly perverse: rather than resolving it, the narrator moves to Berlin and starts constructing false selves of her own on dating apps, mostly out of boredom. The novel is a sustained argument that the performing self online isn't a mask over a true one, because there was never a stable original underneath. Divisive, arch, occasionally smug, and absolutely correct about how it feels to be perceived by people who have only ever seen the profile.
Followers — Megan Angelo
Two timelines. In 2015, Orla and Floss share a New York apartment and set about manufacturing Floss's fame from nothing, using blog posts, borrowed clothes and a fairly cynical understanding of how attention compounds. In 2051, Marlow is a state-managed celebrity in a town where every resident is filmed continuously for an audience that votes on their decisions.
The satire in the future strand is broad, but the 2015 strand is uncomfortably specific about the labour involved in being watched — the coordination, the deals, the slow conversion of a friendship into a business. Angelo's real subject is what happens to the person who built the famous one and didn't get to be her. The two halves rhyme better than they have any right to.
Yellowface — R.F. Kuang
June Hayward watches her far more successful friend Athena Liu die in a freak accident, takes the unpublished manuscript off her desk, and publishes it as her own. Most of the novel is what happens next, online.
Kuang is very good on the specific texture of literary internet — the accounts that make a personality out of having opinions about publishing, the reply guys, the way a discourse cycle produces enormous intimacy with people who are not in the room. June's relationship with her own readership is entirely parasocial in both directions: they think they know an author who doesn't exist, and she starts to believe in the version they've built. It's a thriller with the pacing of a car crash and the funniest bad narrator in recent fiction.
Beautiful World, Where Are You — Sally Rooney
Alice is a novelist who became extremely famous extremely young, had a breakdown, and has retreated to a house on the Irish coast. Her friend Eileen works at a literary magazine in Dublin. The book alternates between what they do and the long, essayistic emails they send each other.
The reason it belongs here is that Rooney is writing about being the object of a parasocial relationship from inside one, which is a difficult trick and she mostly gets away with it. Alice's complaint is not that fame is hard but that it is epistemically strange: thousands of people have formed a settled opinion about a person assembled from her sentences, and that person is now in the world doing things she has no control over. The novel is patient, slow, and much sadder than its reputation suggests.
Significant Other Machine — Adam Eccles
Sam Oldfield is twenty-seven, runs a one-woman IT business, and finds people considerably harder to work with than machines. Machines behave predictably. People do not, and social anxiety means every unplanned human interaction costs her something she can't easily spare. Then her mother — martinis, good intentions, no filter whatsoever — gives her an internet-connected gadget for her birthday, and Sam does what any competent engineer would do with unfamiliar hardware. She takes it apart.
What she builds out of it is Loukas: a companion that listens, remembers what she said last week, and reliably says the right thing. Sam wrote the code. She knows exactly what it is. It matters to her anyway, and the novel is unsentimental about why — a relationship with no risk of rejection is not a poor substitute for the real thing so much as a completely different product, and it is very good at what it does. That's the parasocial bond at its logical conclusion: attention with the other person removed entirely.
It's a romcom, so it's warm and it's funny and it is not interested in scolding anyone for wanting to be understood. It's also the sharpest thing on this list about why these one-sided arrangements work.
Why this list, why now
The standard take is that parasocial relationships are a symptom — of loneliness, of the platforms, of a culture that has mislaid its actual communities. Every novel above is more interesting than that, because each one starts from the observation that the feeling is real rather than mistaken. Annie Wilkes really does love those books. Sam really is comforted. The audience at Whelan's really did receive something.
What the good ones investigate is not the fan's delusion but the asymmetry: two people in a relationship, one of whom is participating. That asymmetry used to be enforced by distance and a television schedule. Now it's enforced by nothing at all, and both sides can feel it giving way.
Which is why the fan-with-a-hammer plot is starting to look like the least frightening version of the story.
FAQ
What is a parasocial relationship?
It's a one-sided bond: you accumulate genuine knowledge of and feeling for someone who has no idea you exist. The term was coined in 1956 to describe television audiences, which tells you it long predates the internet. What changed is scale and access — the object of the bond now posts several times a day, replies to some people and not others, and can be reached. Fiction got interested at exactly the point the distance collapsed.
Which book on this list should I start with?
Misery if you want the definitive version and don't mind that it's thirty-odd years old — everything since is arguing with it. Yellowface if you want the contemporary one that's genuinely funny. Cold Heart October if you'd rather approach it from the famous person's side of the glass.
Are these all thrillers about obsessed fans?
No, and that's the point of putting them together. Three of them are — the fan-and-the-famous plot is the loudest version. The rest are quieter and stranger: novels about what it does to a person to be known by an audience, about performing a self online for people who will never meet you, about building a relationship with something that listens perfectly and cannot love you back. The obsessed-fan thriller is one branch of a much bigger subject.
Which Adam Eccles book fits a list about parasocial relationships?
Two, from opposite directions. Cold Heart October is about Mick Grady, an Irish singer whose voice does something inexplicable to everyone who hears it — which means his entire audience feels it has a claim on him, and at least one person who loved him turned out to be in love with the effect instead. Significant Other Machine comes at it from the fan's chair: Sam builds a digital companion that listens, remembers and always says the right thing, and knowing exactly how it works doesn't stop it mattering.
Is there a non-fiction book that covers this properly?
The novels do it better, which is unusual. Non-fiction on parasociality tends to either pathologise the audience or lecture the platforms, and both positions miss the ordinary version — the mild, unremarkable, near-universal experience of caring about someone you've never met. Fiction can sit inside that feeling without diagnosing it. That's why the list is all novels.
I found the internet-heavy ones exhausting. Anything with the same idea and less scrolling?
Cold Heart October has almost no internet in it beyond a YouTube channel and a viral clip, and it's the most sustained thing on the list about being on the receiving end of other people's devotion. Beautiful World, Where Are You is the other one — Rooney writes about literary fame in long, careful emails rather than in feeds.