A parasocial relationship is a one-sided association formed when one party extends energy, interest and time, but the other person — often a performer or a fictional character — doesn’t even know Person A exists.

Due to the rampancy of social media, influencers and celebrity culture, ours is arguably the most parasocial age in human history. In her disconcerting novel “I’m a Fan,” Sheena Patel takes this lopsided, obsessive and desperate dynamic to unsettling depths, exploring what happens when an initially parasocial relationship becomes social and sexual.

Her unnamed London- based 30- something aspiring- writer protagonist sends a fan letter to a much older, famous male artist, whose responsiveness entangles her in a years-long toxic web of inequality and subjugation. The entanglement expands beyond him — and his compulsive infidelity — to “a woman on the internet who is sleeping with the same man as I am” who “has tens of thousands of followers, is verified, and is the daughter of someone famous in America,” and who inspires an “endless stream of white people” to “fawn in the comments under her posts.”

Patel organizes the book into short, propulsive chapters whose titles resemble tweets or memes, such as “first of all i didn’t miss the red flags i looked at them and thought yeah that’s sexy.” These choppy glimpses unfurl as if by a relentless algorithm, creating a jumpy, distracted, simultaneously attractive and repellent experience not unlike that of stalking someone’s social media, just as the narrator does.

Reading it feels like surrendering to TikTok — addictive and sickening, endless exposure to the negative self-comparison to others that such platforms stoke. When the artist tells her he can’t see her because he’s going to see an ex, she acknowledges painfully, “No one would think to invite me to a private view at the Royal Academy — I am no one.”

“I’m a Fan” dissects why “fanatical adulation” can feel icky, but in a way that sucks the reader in.