This is an honest review in exchange for an advanced reader copy,

This is a quirky book. I found myself comparing the main character that received the threat to another character in a book I had read and adored several years ago. Melvin, who is unhappy with his job and his life in general receives a mystery threat that he realizes is a death threat. The more he thinks about it, the more thrilling the idea becomes to him. He realizes he can gain popularity by telling his associates at work.

As the threats continue you will find yourself smiling at the braveness it allows Melvin to feel At one point he finds himself on the phone with the mystery person and he is annoyed at the lengthy time it is taking for things to happen so he decided to “ guide” the threatened on how to make this threat work .

All in all I found this book charming. I will recommend it to my book reader friends. Thanks for allowing me to read this book.

Can you have a character who is amusingly deranged? Sure. But that will only take you so far. Not so much dark humor as it is grey humor, this was a fine diversion.

Not really my kind of book.

Don't get me wrong. Nathaniel Stein really hit the nail on the head with the intent of this novel, however I just felt pretty unenthused while reading it. Levin's internal monologue was fairly funny at times and the journey he goes on is truly absurd. This would have been great if was the type of story I wanted to read, but personally it just didn't do much in ways of making me feel like I loved it or hated it. It was just a funny little book I read and then swiftly moved onto the next read.

"Mr. Melvin Levin, I'm going to kill you . . ."

Since receiving that note in the mail, Levin's life has been turned upside down. Now every person he encounters could be his own personal assassin. What's even worse is that Melvin's coworkers aren't suitably impressed by his death threat. If it's not enough to get you out of buying napkins for a stupid office party, then what's the point of being "under threat of death"?

Stein is a television writer, and this reminds me quite a bit of an episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." (In fact, I couldn't stop picturing Larry David as the main character.) There is some decent humor here, and I chuckled plenty. However, even for a short novel, this seems to drag on too long. The writing is promising, though, and I'm more than willing to read (or watch) whatever Stein writes next.

Can an actual main character suffer from Main Character Syndrome? This guy does. He is mostly annoying as he tries his best to captialize on the death threat he gets. This is the best thing to ever happen to him. And as you read more and more about his life, you wonder why anyone would bother threatening him. The worst that could happen is he is forced to live his mediocre life imagining that everyone in the room is overly invested in his actions. Occasionally I found him amusing, but he just goes on and on.

The Threat by Nathaniel Stein is a clever and witty look into the machinations of the mind of a man who has received a very unexpected death threat.

At first middle-aged Mervin Levin is horrified at what he reads in a threatening letter (spelling errors and all) but the idea of self importance grows on him. He views problems differently now...what could possibly compare to what he is facing? His otherwise tedious life takes on a new jaunty energy. He grows more confident. While aware of risks involved in going about his daily life, he also grows immune to them in his focus on grabbing a bit of attention which is out of character. He is consumed with the idea of the threat and ignores other areas of his life.

Office politics and Mervin's interactions with others such as the threatener and the coat-check girl are whacky and almost deranged. Humorous bits had me chuckling several times. Yet Mervin's quirky thought processes are strangely relatable. Human nature is a funny thing.

If you're in the mood for dark satire written in a lighthearted manner, this may be for you. It is very niche and would appeal to those willing to settle in and lose themselves in pure quirkiness for a couple of hours.

My sincere thank you to Turner Publishing Company and NetGalley for providing me with an early digital copy of this amusingly unconventional novel.

While the premise was a little better than the execution to me, I still am glad I read The Threat. It offered a lot of things to think about what you would do and did have me turning pages!

The cover of this book is so eye-catching, and it's what initially drew me to the novel. I found the writing a little lacking, and the content of the book was a little dialogue heavy.

3,5

A short, humorous novel about an extremely fussy and finicky man whose tedious life changes radically after he receives a death threat.

"The death threat arrived on a Monday. Levin was settling into his evening routine, warm with the satisfaction of having changed the pants that had been dampened by a passing car on the drizzly walk home from work, and of having finished his back exercises in less than twenty minutes, and of having placed his tea in its dignified corner opposite his to-do list—which today contained the all-important item of preparing the presentation that would clinch his promotion to Mr. Adderley’s former position—when from between a dental-appointment reminder and a catalogue for duffel bags tumbled the neatly addressed envelope that contained the plain little note telling him he was going to be murdered."

More than fear, the threat turns awakening unsuspected confidence in Levin, as now being a man 'under the threat of death' clearly lifts him above ordinary people and their petty worries.

I found it quite funny and liked how it plays with the idea of the twisted thinking we humans apply. It reminded me a bit of Mark Haber, but this was less hilarious.

Many thanks for the audio-ARC via Netgalley - the narrator does a great job conveying the humour.

This book was a bit of a miss for me. I thought the concept sounded really cool, a murder threat makes a man rethink everything about his life and how he is living it. However, the book itself seeme to take itself too seriously- even the funny parts were "literary" funny and didn't hit the mark for me.The writing style was difficult to contend with- sooooo much text annd nnot much to break it up, there were too many uneccessary words that took away fromm the story. It was a miss for me.

Very strong flavor. Sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, the author really sticks to his shtick. I'd recommend reading a 'taste of the first page', if possible, to see if you're into the humor because that will really make or break the story for you.

Levin's behavior felt like a play on Munchausen syndrome - except he's obsessed with maintaining a 'threatened' state, instead of a sick state. He is unlikeable and irritating. But also, I think, a fair representation of human nature (at least the parts we try to hide). I'll admit that 200 pages was a lot to spend in such a ridiculous headspace, but I found it more funny, than not, so was able to soldier through.

As one who enjoys office politics, my favorite parts were Levin's interactions with his coworkers. If you're into cubicle anecdotes, there are definitely some good workplace moments.

Overall, this was different, funny, easy to read in a day. Somewhere in the 3ish star range, but I'm rounding up because I think the book really accomplished what it set out to do.

Absurdist novel that would have worked better as a short story. This is about a man named Marvin Levin who generally dislikes his life. He works in an unnamed office and dislikes his coworkers and he appears to have no family or friends. One night when he is supposed to be working on a presentation to get a promotion, Marvin receives a death threat in the mail. He has no idea who sent the threat, but for some reason it makes him feel important. The rest of the book is a stream of consciousness type story where Marvin considers whether various things like his walk, his expressions, etc. are all fitting for a man who receives a death threat.

This is the type of story that used to appear in the New Yorker in the 1980's and felt dated to me. There is very little dialogue and Marvin's thoughts are repetitive and not very interesting. The book was under 200 pages which was good as I was getting bored with Marvin and his story. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy of this ARC in exchange for a review.

I love the premise of this book. I went into it really excited to read it but it was incredibly boring. I was waiting for it to be more funny, more relatable, more... anything. It just did not hit the mark for me. I really think someone will like this book but it just was not right for me. It seemed a little pointless, it was very wordy, and the climax was not that great. The book was short but it could have even been shorter and packed a bigger punch.

I absolutely love the concept of the book and the idea that I would find humor throughout the book. The wrap up was fun and I enjoyed seeing Melvin make out of character changes throughout the text. Some of the character development fell flat for me but I am glad I read it.

It's an intriguing premise and there are glimpses of execution that are very well done. The MC, Levin has grandiose ideas of what a death threat says about him, how he feels it changes the world's perception of him, as well as his perception of others. It becomes his entire personality. I liked following Levin's steady descent into delusion, almost a parallel to how a serial killer escalates, but from the side of the victim. The interactions with the threatener were absurd nuggets of fun and the final confrontation was a rather hilarious surprise as well.

But all of this is overshadowed by repetition and wordiness. It's a 192 page book that already feels too long. Almost like an excellent short story that was filled in with repeated phrases to make it longer...'under threat of death' this, 'higher plane' that, it was just too much. Maybe it is meant to be a 'stream of consciousness' style prose, but it didn't work for me in this particular case.

I'd want to give it a 4⭐ for the idea, but a 2⭐ for the execution. So let's average out to a 3⭐.

Melvin Levin is 41, living by himself, a pushover to the extent that he has arranged his rugs in his apartment so that he will not annoy his downstairs neighbor who doesn’t like the way he walks. One day Levin receives a mysterious death threat, and this one thing gives him such a sense of importance that his outlook on life is transformed in an instant. I enjoy satirical novels but this one unfortunately didn’t work for me. Levin is absurd, yes. I did smile at times due to his comical thoughts and behavior. His stream-of-consciousness observations quickly become repetitive and boring, and unfortunately, I didn’t find the writing to be very funny. As a short story, this might be more successful.

This sounds like my kind of quirky, but unfortunately I did not finish this. I wasn't enjoying it and don't think we need a copy in our collection.

I went in for the cover. I do that. Oftentimes, it works out. Sometimes it doesn’t. The Threat has more than a cute cover. The description makes it sound like an amusing satire. And it is, to be fair, for a while, before it gets tedious and stays tedious.
The plot revolves around Melvin Levin, a thoroughly mediocre man who spends most of his life being as decent and inoffensive as possible. It hasn’t brought him much outside of a thankless job and a challenging-at-best apartment situation. Nevertheless, Levin perseveres … until he gets the eponymous threat.
The threat, much like Levin as the protagonist, leaves a lot to be desired. It’s half-baked at most. But to Levin, it is by far the most exciting thing to have happened to him in pretty much ever, and thus he steadily proceeds to change his unexciting life into the life of someone existing under the threat of death.
This essentially involves a lot of performative behavior, so the readers end up spending the entire novel in Levin’s mind as he convolutes himself to be more interesting. But the thing is, he can only get so far with all of that—he is literally written that way, with a lot of limitations.
What’s curious is that there are a some genuinely clever and amusing things about this novel, but they fail to add up to a cohesive quality narrative. Instead, the novel reads like a cute but very much one note joke stretched out into nearly 200 pages, right down to the overwhelmingly underwhelming ending.
It seems that the author tried with this debut to go for European existentialism and fell short. So at least he had the decency to make the overall production short. It reads quickly, too, though a difficult one to recommend. Thanks Netgalley.

This book was very boring. There was a nice flow to it so it was an easy and quick read, but ultimately it felt like a waste of time. The main character is so annoying, but unrealistically so. I can't imagine someone who is so delusional and drunk on their own self-importance that they would believe the nonsensical things he does where he thinks that every action of others is confirmation of his arrival on a higher plane of life. The story just didn't make any sense to me. He is threatened in a ridiculous way by someone who could not possible illicit any actual fear for his life and suddenly he thinks that makes him better and more interesting than everyone else. It all just felt so pointless. And unsurprisingly in the end nothing comes of it. The plot was very shallow and uninteresting to me and there was nothing about this story that encouraged me to read on. I had no particular desire to keep reading to find out what would happen because even before I got to the conclusion I knew it would be pointless and anticlimactic which it was. It isn't the worst book I have ever read but it was so throughly uneventful that I long for the time spent reading it back. This book was not worth the vision used to read it.

Let me start by saying that I love the cover. It's what drew me to the book in the first place, and I had high hopes for this book that is described as 'absurdist (true), moving (didn't get there), and savagely funny (were we reading the same book?)

The story revolves around Melvin Levin, a middle-aged man living a dull and uneventful life, until he receives a mysterious death threat in the mail. It shocks him a bit at first, but gradually, he almost starts enjoying the fact that he is 'under threat of death' (a phrase that is quite possibly repeated throughout the book about 137 times or thereabouts-just a wild guess).

He turns into a bit of a d*ck actually, because he now sees himself as superior and above everyone else because his life is being threatened, while the others around him are so inconsequential that nobody would even bother sending them a death threat-they're simply not that important.

I suppose I can see what the author was trying to accomplish. But try and imagine J. Alfred Prufrock trying to portray one of the old endearing characters from a Fredrik Backman novel, but this whole story being written by Salman Rushdie. I disliked the end result SO MUCH.

There were WALLS of text, with a smattering of dialogue just to break it up now and again. It was just a meandering stream of consciousness that sparkled with self-indulgent pomposity of language, using too many words to say precious little. Case in point-there are TWO PAGES of text dedicated to the act of checking his coat in at a restaurant. Sorry, but life's too short for this.

Oh, and did I already mention that I came across the term 'under threat of death' enough times in the 33% of the book that I did read, to make me want to fling the book across the room (except that I couldn't because I was reading it on my Kindle)? Arrrrgh!!!!

There are a lot of heavyweights singing paeans of (advance)praise for this book, and it boggles the mind to think about the possibilities that could have brought that about. Is it possible that THEY ACTUALLY READ and LIKED the book???? It seems inconceivable.

This is all just to say that I would never subject myself (or anyone else) to this book, except as a sleep-aid, or a test of mental endurance.

Thanks to Netgalley and Turner Publishing Company/ Keylight Books for a digital ARC of this title in exchange for my honest review.