The Threat: A Novel

**Dripping with voice,** The Threat **is a hilariously relatable story of self-doubt, aging, and frustration. Literary yet accessible, Stein’s story explores what happens when the only way you can live is by feeling like you might die.**
Melvin Levin is dissatisfied—with his job, with life, with it all. He’s too polite and too boring, and the monotony of his days is only broken when he has to clean up after his neighbor’s frequently vomiting cat. That is, until he receives a mysterious death threat in the mail. Under the thrill of potentially getting murdered, Melvin begins to feel truly alive again. The threat gives Melvin a sense of self-importance—someone wants him dead—and, ironically, a new lease on life. However, soon, Melvin becomes obsessed with the threat, increasingly forming the basis of his new, unstable identity. But as his obsession with maintaining this identity becomes all-consuming, he risks blinding himself to the twin dangers of the threat itself and—perhaps worse—his own deranged mind.
At once absurdist, moving, and savagely funny, *The Threat* is a timeless parable of the comic lengths to which people go to protect the delusions that validate them.