It scares--and titillates--in such movies as "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle "and "Basic Instinct." It violently ended the lives of legendary artists such as Selena and John Lennon, and thousands of people endure it daily in anonymity from ex-lovers and strangers. Stalking has been a fact of human society for a surprisingly long time, yet it is only in the last two decades that the term "stalking" came into wide use throughout mass culture. Bran Nicol traces here the history of stalking and chronicles how acts of extreme obsession have created a public fixation of their own. This unprecedented study draws on a wealth of sources--including forensic psychology, films, literature, news reports, and cultural theory--to examine stalking as a behavior and a social phenomenon. Moving from Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa "to "Fatal Attraction "and from Charles Dickens's "Our Mutual Friend "to "Taxi Driver "and "One Hour Photo," Nicol skillfully probes how stalking has pervaded our civilizatoin f