It's been a while, but I have read Dathan Auerbach before, because Doubleday sent me a copy of his 2018 novel 'Bad Man' for review. I was aware of 'Penpal' back then, because it had generated a serious buzz, and knew that it had been optioned for film. What I didn't know was what it was about. I liked 'Bad Man' but it was a massively slow burn and I wasn't ready to leap into another one. The years passed and here we are, with me tackling 'Penpal' at last for the Books of Horror Go To List.

While there is certainly common ground between the two, this is a very different book and it's an incredibly accessible one that surely counts as one of the creepiest novels that I've ever read. It's creepy because of what happens in it, which taps into one of the most abiding fears parents have, but it's creepier because the character affected really didn't understand what was happening at the time. After all, he was just a kid. Some of it was kept from him for his own sake and the parts he experienced personally were seen through innocent eyes that spun a different light on them.

The novel is framed as his attempts to reconstruct what happened, now that he's become aware that something did, using what he calls mental archaeology. I should mention that I'm using the male pronoun because this narrator is male, but I don't believe we technically know that for sure until part four quite a long way into the book. We pick it up gradually through context. We aren't let in on his name either, even by the end, and, in fact, there's only one name mentioned for the longest time, at least the first couple of parts, which take up almost seventy pages. That's his best friend Josh. That means that much of this feels highly anonymous, which has an impact.

Part one is why the book exists, because Auerbach, then a nobody going by 1000Vultures, now the imprint that published the novel, posted it to Reddit in 2001 as a creepypasta called 'Footsteps'. It was a standalone piece at that point but it received such a strong response that he wrote another and, eventually, expanded them into this fixup novel. I can absolutely see why that response. This is a major rabbit hole of a first part, one that surely prompted any parents reading to drop their phones or run from their laptops and make sure their kids were where they were meant to be.

The unnamed narrator is six at this point and he wakes up in the woods behind his house. He has a bunk bed, even as an only child, and sleeps on the top bunk, but has got used to getting up to pee in the night and waking back up on the bottom bunk. He's never woken up in the woods behind his house before and, while he knows them pretty well, he can't figure out how to get back home. He does, eventually, and is promptly grabbed. That it's by his panicked mum and the strange man in the house is a cop is beside the point. What clinches it as waking nightmare is the fact that there's a runaway letter on his pillow. Which he didn't write. Damn, that's creepy on so many levels.

Part two takes place a year earlier, when he's in kindergarten and it starts to explain, at least to us, where some of this is coming from. The school has a thing they call the Balloon Project. Each of the kids writes a note to a potential penpal, has their photo taken at school and it's all attached to a balloon (with an accompanying official letter of explanation), then let go into the sky. Yes, it does seem to be inviting trouble, but I should emphasise that the only address listed is the school and all correspondence is supervised.

Now, our narrator includes a dollar on which he's scrawled "FOR STAMPS" but all he gets back is a blurry Polaroid. There's no note and no return address. By the end of year, though, he has almost fifty of them. It's a little weird, but there doesn't seem to be any danger. Until, that is, he sets up a snow cone stand outside his house with Josh and one of his customers pays with a dollar bill that has "FOR STAMPS" scrawled on it. That prompts him to take a fresh look at the Polaroids, with the realisation that he's actually in all of them. He's certainly in the one that arrives in the mail, that doesn't have a postmark. It's of him and Josh.

As you might imagine, mum's on the phone to the police at this point, especially as she's a single mum. Dad's already long gone. Things get freakier from there and it doesn't surprise at all when they move houses inbetween first and second grade. They do stay in the same city and mum gives him a walkie talkie to keep in touch with Josh. However, these things don't look the same to a five- or six-year-old kid. They're odd for sure, but he forgets about them and gets on with his life. What follows over the remainder of the book are other incidents that he similarly thought innocuous as a kid but don't look that way in hindsight to an adult.

Eventually we get to the finalé, which is inevitably one of the details that he didn't experience so had to learn much later during conversations with his mother, who surely didn't want to let any of this out. It's utterly brutal to us and, while it must have provided closure to the narrator, it likely prompted a great deal of therapy. And, as brutal as it is, what hit me the most really wasn't that it happened. After all, we knew all along that the narrator was going to survive this, whatever it turned out to be, because he's the author reconstructing it for publication. What hit me the most was that he didn't know that it happened. That's the freakiest aspect of this to me.

Think about it. Think about the worst things that could have happened to you as a child, way back when you were really young, the sort of things that you fear might happen to your own kids so do everything in your power to avoid. They're pretty bad, right? We wouldn't want anyone to have to go through those sort of things. But bear with me. Now imagine that they did happen to you when you were a kid but you didn't realise at the time. You remember some weird stuff and some stuff that was uncomfortable and maybe some stuff you didn't understand, but you've never put it all together in your mind and realised what it all adds up to. To me, that's worse still.

And that's what Auerbach does here. There are a whole bunch of individual moments here that I'd love to highlight to freak you the hell out but I'm not going to do that because they're all parts of the seriously twisted build that Auerbach makes this book do. It almost boggles my mind that he'd written these parts separately, albeit not with huge gaps in between. I can see how they could all be considered self-contained because each part is freaky on its own. However, they're each puzzle pieces and it's the picture that we only see when we put those pieces together that's freakiest.

It doesn't surprise me that he's got lumbered with "author of 'Penpal'" on probably everything he put his name to after this point. It's a legacy of a book that could easily overshadow a career. I'm not shocked either that, while this novel was already optioned when I read 'Bad Man' in 2018, it's still not been adapted into a film. That's because it would be very difficult to do it justice, largely because it would rely on highly impactful actors who can believably play a five- or six-year-old and whose parents would be okay with them being in a film like this. Such actors do not grow on trees.

To wrap, I'll add that one of the most frequently asked questions in the horror fiction groups that I belong to on social media is "What's the scariest book you've ever read?" A whole slew of titles do get suggested, most of which aren't remotely scary, but the diehards have little idea how to give an answer because nothing's scary. We might react to jump scares in horror movies but words on pages don't scare people. How could they? And, even if they could scare people, we're inured to it because we got over it long ago when we were teenagers or even kids. That said, while this didn't scare me per se, I can easily imagine it scaring the pants of a lot of readers. Especially parents of very young kids. I think I'll throw it out as my answer next time I see that question asked. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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