Creep: A Love Story Summary, Characters and Themes

Creep by Emma van Straaten is a dark psychological thriller that plunges readers into the unsettling mind of Alice, a woman obsessed with a man named Tom. 

What starts as quiet, almost ritualistic cleaning of his apartment spirals into a disturbing journey of fantasy, manipulation, and violence. Emma van Straaten masterfully explores themes of loneliness, mental illness, and the dangerous allure of obsession. Through Alice’s fractured perspective, the novel examines how delusions can distort reality and lead to destructive acts, blurring the lines between love and control.

Summary

Alice is an ordinary cleaner with an extraordinary fixation—she is utterly obsessed with Tom, a man whose apartment she cleans weekly. To Alice, this isn’t just a job; it’s a sacred ritual, an intimate communion with someone she believes she shares a deep, spiritual bond with, even though they’ve never spoken.

Her cleaning isn’t merely about tidiness; every object, every fingerprint, every item in Tom’s flat is dissected and imbued with meaning. She reads signs and patterns into the smallest details, constructing a narrative of love and connection that exists only in her mind.

Outside Tom’s apartment, Alice’s life is hollow and lonely. She works a tedious paralegal job she detests and lives a largely isolated existence.

She invents stories to cover her Wednesday absences, which she spends obsessively cleaning Tom’s flat. To get closer to him, she even volunteers at a care home where Tom’s grandfather lives, using this proximity as another way to insert herself into his world.

Despite her outward appearance of normalcy, Alice’s thoughts reveal a deeply fractured psyche, plagued by intrusive fantasies that grow increasingly intense and detached from reality.

Her obsession isn’t passive—it becomes all-consuming. Alice imagines moments of intimacy with Tom, from the tender to the violent, blending affection with an unsettling desire to merge with him physically and spiritually.

She believes that if they could just meet, everything would fall into place. To prepare for this meeting, she consults astrology, chooses auspicious dates, and plans every detail meticulously, convinced that fate is on her side.

But reality is harsh and unyielding. Tom has a girlfriend, Tiggy, who represents everything Alice envies and despises. Her jealousy turns toxic as she spies on Tiggy, stalking her movements and sabotaging their relationship through deceitful and manipulative acts.

Alice’s obsession begins to cross dangerous lines, escalating from secretive watching to outright interference. She sends humiliating, forged notes designed to break Tom and Tiggy apart, a sign of her spiraling mental state.

The tension rises as Alice follows Tom to Paris, an act of desperation born from her inability to accept boundaries or the truth of their non-relationship. In the city, she hovers on the edge of reality and delusion, emotionally overwhelmed by her proximity to Tom yet invisible to him.

A brief, subtle contact with him—a touch unnoticed by Tom—becomes monumental to Alice, intensifying her fixation and the gulf between them.

As her obsession deepens, Alice takes drastic and destructive measures. She breaks into Tom’s apartment, vandalizing his belongings in a twisted ritual meant to bind their fates together.

This act of violence is not just rage; in Alice’s mind, it is an ultimate expression of love—proof that their connection is real and inevitable.

Her world unravels further when she is arrested. Despite the gravity of her situation, Alice’s internal narrative remains disturbingly detached, even romanticizing her actions as manifestations of a profound spiritual bond with Tom.

She interprets shared pain and injuries as symbols of their connection, refusing to see her behavior as anything but love.

In the aftermath, Alice oscillates between moments of reflection and denial. She returns to Tom’s flat, interpreting ordinary signs as secret messages and holding onto fantasies of a shared future.

She fabricates stories to explain her absences and paints herself as a victim of circumstance, clinging to the hope of rebirth through her imagined relationship.

However, reality continues to close in. Repeated arrests and confrontations underscore the dangerous consequences of her obsession.

Still, Alice’s mind remains locked in delusion, spinning her actions into tales of love and destiny. Even as her world collapses, she remains tethered to the idea that her pain and isolation are the price of a sacred, if one-sided, bond.

Creep is a chilling exploration of loneliness, desire, and mental illness—how obsession can twist love into something destructive, and how the line between devotion and delusion can become terrifyingly thin.

It’s a haunting dive into a troubled mind, where reality fractures and fantasy consumes.

Characters

Alice

Alice is the novel’s deeply troubled protagonist whose psychological state drives the entire story. She is a woman consumed by an intense, delusional obsession with Tom, a man whose life she invades under the guise of cleaning his apartment.

Her obsession is both romantic and violent, marked by a desperate need for connection that twists into control and fantasy. Alice’s internal world is rich with poetic, lyrical reflections, but these mask a deteriorating mental health condition.

She is socially isolated and alienated, trapped in a mundane and unfulfilling existence marked by a tedious paralegal job she loathes and fabricated excuses to cover her absences. Alice’s actions—ranging from stalking and manipulation to violence—are rationalized through her warped belief in a spiritual bond with Tom.

Her life revolves around symbolic rituals: cleaning becomes a sacred act of worship, and every detail in Tom’s flat takes on exaggerated meaning. Despite moments of physical intimacy with others, Alice remains emotionally tethered to Tom, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy.

Her mental decline is portrayed through her increasing disconnection from everyday life, leading to destructive and criminal behavior. Ultimately, Alice is a deeply tragic figure whose yearning for love morphs into obsession, control, and self-destruction.

Tom

Tom is a largely silent, peripheral character around whom the entire story revolves but who remains almost unknowable through direct interaction. Seen almost exclusively through Alice’s obsessive gaze, Tom is idealized and mythologized, a symbol of a perfect, unattainable love.

His real personality and motivations are barely revealed, making him more a projection of Alice’s fantasies than a fully fleshed-out character. Tom’s presence is defined by the traces he leaves behind—his apartment, his belongings, and the subtle signs Alice reads obsessively.

He appears distant and indifferent, unaware of Alice’s intrusion and fixation, which adds to the power imbalance between them. Tom’s relationship with others, such as his girlfriend Tiggy and his grandfather at the care home, grounds him in reality but also fuels Alice’s jealousy and desperation.

His minimal interaction with Alice only heightens her need to fabricate connection and significance in their “relationship.” In essence, Tom serves as both a real person and a symbol of Alice’s fractured desire for love and validation.

Tiggy

Tiggy occupies the role of antagonist in Alice’s eyes, representing the real-life obstacle to Alice’s imagined relationship with Tom. She is a gallery owner, confident and socially integrated, which contrasts starkly with Alice’s isolation.

Through Alice’s perspective, Tiggy becomes an object of envy, hatred, and suspicion. Alice scrutinizes Tiggy’s every move, feeling that Tiggy’s presence threatens the spiritual bond Alice believes she shares with Tom.

Tiggy’s life and achievements trigger Alice’s insecurities and fuel her destructive impulses, such as forging notes and sending humiliating packages. Though Tiggy is only glimpsed from Alice’s perspective, she embodies the real-world forces that resist Alice’s delusions and intrusion.

Tiggy’s role deepens the conflict between fantasy and reality, making her an inadvertent catalyst for Alice’s unraveling.

James

James appears briefly as a contrast to Alice’s fixation on Tom. He represents a fleeting physical and emotional connection that Alice pursues to fill her loneliness.

Their interactions highlight Alice’s inability to form genuine relationships; despite moments of intimacy, her mind remains tethered to Tom. James’s role underscores Alice’s emotional fragmentation and her struggle to engage with real people beyond her obsessive fantasy.

He serves as a mirror to her isolation, showing that physical closeness alone cannot break through her mental barriers.

Themes

The Fragility and Fragmentation of Identity Through the Lens of Obsessive Delusion

Creep intricately portrays the protagonist Alice’s psyche as it splinters under the weight of her obsession with Tom. Her identity becomes a fragmented construct, built on fantasy rather than reality, which challenges the very notion of a coherent self.

Alice’s selfhood is not stable; it fluctuates wildly between moments of lucid awareness and disintegrated delusion. She inhabits multiple personas—cleaner, volunteer, lover, victim—and each serves as a fragile veneer masking deeper insecurities and isolation.

The novel probes how obsessive fixation can consume an individual so fully that their own sense of who they are dissolves, replaced by a parasitic identity tethered to another. This theme wrestles with the terrifying dissolution of personal boundaries and the loss of agency, where one’s self is subsumed entirely within the fantasy of connection.

Violence and Intimacy as Twisted Expressions of Love and Control

The narrative explores an unsettling conflation between love and violence, suggesting that Alice’s acts of aggression—both symbolic and physical—are distorted attempts to assert control and forge intimacy.

Her destructive behavior, such as breaking glass in Tom’s apartment or fabricating elaborate scenarios to insert herself into his life, serves as a perverse language of affection. Violence here is not mere rage but an expression of deep emotional need, a way for Alice to externalize her internal chaos and make her presence undeniable.

The novel probes the darkest contours of human attachment, where harm and desire become intertwined, and love is envisioned as something that can only be secured through domination or sacrifice.

This complex theme challenges conventional definitions of affection, exposing how trauma and loneliness can warp fundamental human drives.

Ritualization of the Mundane as a Means to Manufacture Meaning in an Existential Void

Alice’s obsessive cleaning rituals and her hyper-focus on minute details in Tom’s environment reveal a desperate attempt to impose order and meaning on a chaotic inner and outer world.

The book delves into how ritual—often a religious or spiritual act—can be co-opted as a coping mechanism for existential emptiness. Each act of cleaning is elevated to a sacred performance, a symbolic communion with the object of her obsession.

The narrative demonstrates how, in the absence of authentic connection or purpose, humans turn to obsessive routines and symbolic gestures to construct significance.

This theme reflects on the human craving for transcendence through mundane acts, and how this craving can spiral into pathological fixation when untethered from reality.

Disintegration of Reality Through the Blurring Boundaries Between Fantasy and the External World

One of the most haunting thematic explorations in Creep is the erosion of clear distinctions between Alice’s fantasies and the objective world around her.

The novel vividly depicts how the mind can warp reality, blending imagined narratives with actual events until the line is indistinguishable. Alice’s internal monologues and external actions reveal a consciousness trapped in an echo chamber of delusion, where every coincidence or trivial detail is interpreted as confirmation of her imagined bond with Tom.

This theme interrogates the fragile nature of perception and memory, raising questions about how subjective realities can override empirical truth. It also probes the dangers of unchecked imagination, especially when it spirals into obsession, showing how the collapse of reality testing can lead to destructive consequences.

Sociocultural Isolation of Modern Urban Life as a Catalyst for Psychological Alienation and Obsession

Creep situates Alice’s psychological unravelling within the alienating context of modern urban existence, where superficial social interactions and emotional loneliness breed pathological attachments.

The novel examines how cities, despite their density of population, can engender profound isolation and anonymity. Alice’s hollow work environment and shallow relationships compound her disconnection, driving her to seek intimacy through voyeurism and fantasy.

This theme critiques the paradox of contemporary urban life—where hyperconnectivity coexists with profound emotional solitude—highlighting how societal structures and alienation contribute to mental illness and obsessive behaviors.

It underscores the human need for meaningful connection and the catastrophic fallout when that need is unmet.