‘You’ Killer Joe Goldberg Channels Willy Wonka in ‘For You and Only You’
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Season Four of Netflix’s hit show about everyone’s favorite serial-killing stalker might be wrapped, but that doesn’t mean you’ve seen the last of Joe Goldberg in 2023. Remember, the You series is based on the delightfully creepy novels by Caroline Kepnes, and the next book, For You and Only You, is out on April 25th. Rolling Stone has an exclusive excerpt.
To catch up the stragglers, You follows Goldberg (Penn Badgley), a bookseller who falls in love fast, hard, and dangerously — often murdering anyone who stands in the way of his current object of infatuation, including the woman in question. When we last left Badgley’s Joe, he was fleeing a suburban existence with the love interest from Season Two (and book two), named, appropriately, Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti) — leaving a path of death and destruction in his wake, and pursuing librarian Marienne (Tati Gabrielle). TV Joe heads to London, where he becomes a professor and finds himself in the middle of an old-school whodunit involving a mystery socialite. Meanwhile, Joe from the books flees his new home on Seattle’s Bainbridge Island after his librarian love interest, Mary Kay, is accidentally killed by her daughter.
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While the previous books in the series dropped before their corresponding seasons, Kepnes’ new book and Season Four of the Netflix series were penned independently; all the Netflix crew knew was that the book Joe was headed to an academic setting. For You and Only You finds Joe enrolled in a prestigious writing program at Harvard, complete with a pompous instructor, his talented wife, and a writing prodigy/Dunkin’ employee named Wonder. Joe finds himself obsessed with both earning his instructor’s praise and the brash Wonder, and, well, we can see where this is headed. Read on as he plots his first of many crimes.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published in 1964 and we’re still talking about it today because Roald Fucking Dahl cracked the code of people. He knew how to kill off children!
He turned them into caricatures and killed them softly, off the page, and it’s a magic trick. Millions of readers climb into that book and identify with Charlie — ha — and they go and encourage their children to be like Charlie — double ha — when the reality is both ugly and undeniable.
Most people are flawed. They’re not Charlie. They’re Mr. Dahl or Veruca Fucking Salt.
And how did he do it, Wonder? How did he kill off those terrible, irredeemable children? Easy-peasy. He used his fucking factory, his house. Houses kill people in a myriad of ways because all houses are booby traps. I know from personal, harrowing experience that houses can fucking kill. Hell, the woman I mistook for the love of my life met her end when she fell down the stairs in our house. RIP Mary Kay DiMarco was stubborn. Making like Tom Cruise in Risky Business and wearing socks on hardwood floors. There was no investigation into her death because the proof was in the pudding — socks meet floors, floors meet stairs, skull meets concrete — but Mary Kay DiMarco did not die in vain.
She is an angel on our shoulders. Because of her, I figured out how to kill Your Bobby — he’s gonna fall down the stairs — but don’t fret, my jealous darling Wonder. You helped too.
You wrote a short story called “Lost Marbles.” I found it online after we first met, and the story is set in Bobby’s aunt Ro’s house, the one where he now lives. You offered me vivid, useful descriptions of the house:
She hoarded everything, long-expired tin cans of coffee in the cabinet “just in case,” and she collected end tables, end tables topped with bowls of marbles. It was the chicken and the egg in real life. Did she buy the tables so that she would have a place to put the marbles or did she buy the marbles so that she would need all those rickety folding tables?
Even in your early writing, you were coming to terms with being raised in a trap. Ro left the house to her “favorite nephew” and Your Bobby uses the house as fodder for Instagram — big-box TV, God bless ya, Ro — and you and countless other women see Bobby as a sentimental fool because he hasn’t changed a thing about the house since Ro passed away. He gripes about the dryer from hell and the world’s worst wallpaper and fact-check, Wonder! He isn’t “sentimental.” He’s a sexist bastard who expects you to renovate when he gets tired of stringing you along and invites you to move in with him.
And here’s another fact-check: Bobby’s brother and sister don’t think of him as a sentimental fool. To Mick and Ginnie Your Bobby is a greedy stubborn prick.
For a long time now Mick and Ginnie have wanted Bobby to sell Ro’s house. Yes, once upon a time, the Skellys were a donut fucking dynasty, your heroes across the street who sponsored Little League teams, opening one store after another. But times change. It’s like Mick screamed a couple years ago on Facebook: FUCKING AVOCADO TOAST?! WHAT NEXT? The Skelly family business has been sliding ever since Dunkin’ dropped the Donuts. They’ve closed stores, openly yearned for the times when it was Here’s your coffee, here’s your cruller, now go fuck your mother and come back tomorrow!
Bobby’s sister, Ginnie, projects positivity to the Globe when asked about rising costs at their central bakery, but the real estate records tell the story of a dynasty crumbling. Mick sold his lake house in New Hampshire and Ginnie’s family downsized, but what has Prince Bobby done to help the family?
Nothing.
Aunt Ro’s house is a cash cow, but Bobby won’t fucking milk it. Mick posts the Zillow link to Ro’s three-bedroom raised ranch in Braintree three, sometimes four times a week — Ideal teardown for a family! — and Ginnie is in all caps realtor mode — PRICE REDUCTION! BE THE LUCKIEST FAMILY AND BUY THIS LAND! IT’S A STEAL! — but Your Bobby has the keys to that castle, and he. Won’t. Sell.
It’s like writing, isn’t it? You obsess and you brainstorm and you turn to your “mentor” for advice, and in the end, the solution is simple: Use his family to drag him away from you.
So I did it. I channeled my inner Casey Affleck and I called Mick and told him that his brother is pissing me off because I want to buy that house in Braintree but I haven’t even gotten to see it because Bobby’s giving me the runaround and I’m leaving town tomorrow. I was good — David O. Russell wouldn’t cut me out of his fucking movie — and Mick called his flaky brother and demanded that Your Bobby leave your house to come to Ro’s house as in his house as in this house.
Yes, I got here first, and I pick up the fake rock on the side lawn and here’s the key and I’m in — mothballs and marbles — and it’s a PTSD-inducing doozy, the way this house even smells like the Bainbridge Public Library. I pick up a bowl of marbles and I am in your fiction, the words on the page inspired by the first and worst part of your life. I open the door to the basement and POW — kitty litter and Pine-Sol and man sweat, Bobby sweat — and you should have called your story “The Damp” but I know, titles are hard. I set up marbles on the steps that lead to the concrete floor, and this is a writer’s life. We take the terrible things that happened to us, and we pour them into our art.
Your Bobby could arrive any minute — assholes in foreign cars drive like assholes in foreign cars — so I cross the basement and open the barrel of the old dryer, the one Bobby waxes nostalgic about on his fucking Instagram. He’s got a load in there and I toss some marbles in the dryer. I push the button and I leap backward because holy fucking shit, Wonder.
That beast is roaring and will I be collateral damage in my selfless quest to set you free?
I crouch behind old cardboard boxes — another fucking fire hazard, this house is a death trap — and no. The dryer won’t explode, not now. Things are going my way because I put in the work. Cherish already defriended Bobby on Facebook — that was fast — and I’m in charge of this house. I’ve pulled the strings and laid down the marbles and this is how Roald Dahl felt when he was executing those children off the page, in the recesses of the factory. The house will kill Your Bobby, not me.
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