Geek Lit: Penpal

I’ve been burned in the past with self-published books.  There are a number of them out there that could use a good editor and are, to put it bluntly, not very good.

But there are also a number out there that are very much worth your time and mine.  One such work is the rather fantastic debut horror novel Penpal by Dathan Auerbach.

Auerbach started this work as a series of short stories on Reddit.  The work was well-received and a Kickstarter campaign got him the cash he needed to publish.  While there are a handful of times where there’s a blatant spelling error, the book reads like a professionally written, edited, and published work, and it’s to his credit that he was able to craft something this good as a first novel.

The plot revolves around a nameless narrator relating things from his childhood.  His memories are non-linear, bouncing around in time.  The earliest are from kindergarten, and the latest are from when he was about 15.  Each chapter can more or less stand as a story on its own.  Yes, later chapters refer back to events and characters from the earlier ones, but I suspect reading each chapter individually won’t hamper anyone’s enjoyment of the work as a whole, aside from the last chapter that more or less explains what happened.

The work, as written, tells of a man trying to figure out some strange and tragic events from his childhood.  The only other person to know what happened is his mom, and his present-day self says it took a lot of effort to get her to tell him some of these things.  Each chapter deals with another strange and scary incident he experienced growing up.  He just never really connected everything the right way until he was an adult, and each chapter seems to get progressively scarier even as they stay distinctly non-linear.  The first such incident is the narrator, at the age of six, waking up in the middle of the night to find himself out in the middle of the woods behind his house.  He has no idea how he got there or how to get back, and he’s still in his pajamas.

Auerbach has some real talent here.  The stories/chapters seem rather mundane at first as the narrator relates what happened to him as he grew up, and each story only gets creepier and creepier as both the individual story and the novel itself progresses.  For example, a discussion on how a childhood injury made making new friends difficult at first while he was in the first grade becomes a tragic encounter as a high schooler in a completely natural way, and as that is a late chapter, the stakes are raised for how bad the tragic incident actually is.  I spent a lot of time looking for connections between stories, and while some were obvious, the ending of the novel which explained everything without being too explicit (the reader still has to fill in some blanks on his or her own) still hits hard by showing just how much some people knew that the narrator initially didn’t.  Nine and a half out of ten walkie talkie gifts.

Oh, and given the child-in-peril plot, this book may be scarier for anyone who actually has kids.  You’ve been warned.