Well that was interesting.
I just finished the debut novel PENPAL by Dathan Auerbach and I’m left thinking I really need to step it up in my own novels.
Originally written as a series of posts on the “No Sleep” subreddit in September 2011 before being turned into a full-length novel, PENPAL is the story of an unnamed narrator recounting events from his childhood that he had forgotten and is reminded of by conversations with his mother years later.
The story is told in non-linear fashion, so there’s a bit of work to be done by the reader in piecing the full story together, but in the end, it’s the best way to keep from spoiling certain aspects of the plot.
And what is the plot?
PENPAL is the story of this very young boy—the bulk of the novel takes place while he’s still in grade school between the ages of 5-12—being unknowingly stalked by a predator, and the weird events that occurred during the course of his childhood. In one story, the one that opens the novel, he remembers waking up one night, barefoot, in the woods just past his house with no idea how he got there. When he finally makes it home, he finds police and his mother, frantic over a note he’d left on his bed saying he was running away. Only when the narrator reads the note, he mentions that’s not how his name is spelled.
Later, in kindergarten, his class releases balloons as a class project with notes tied to them asking whoever finds them to write to them at the school and they can be penpals. When our narrator’s note is finally answered, there’s no letter, only an out of focus Polaroid. Over the course of that year, 48 Polaroids are received, and it’s only later that the narrator realizes, while not the focus of any of the pictures, he’s actually in them, in the background. Later, when he and his best friend Josh open a drink stand in their neighborhood, the narrator receives a dollar bill as payment with the words “For stamps” written on it. The same dollar bill he’d included with his balloon letter.
PENPAL is a non-traditionally-structured novel in that, not only do we never get a name for the narrator, but the antagonist is also off-screen for the majority of the book, unknown to the protagonist until the end. There’s no climactic confrontation. Hell, there’s no real “rising action” at all, just a chapter near the end where secrets are revealed to both the reader and the narrator, and pieces are not merely fit into place, but slammed there.
I really enjoyed PENPAL. It’s the first novel in a long time that I’ve read where I skim ahead to see what’s coming and then find myself counting down until my next break at work (where I do most of my prose reading) so I can get to that next scene, especially near the end when the pieces finally start forming a whole picture.
Auerbach’s style is conducive to the story being told. The narration fits into that young mindset without being overly simplistic and talking down to the reader, which definitely made reading about the adventures of a five-year-old easier to digest.
This is also the first novel I can recall reading where the dread so fully permeates every chapter, every scene, every page. There’s just this constant undercurrent of “oh no, that’s not good; something very very bad is going on here and I have no idea what it is” and I, for one, loved that about the book. PENPAL dropped into my life out of nowhere, just another random book on the horror shelf at a local bookstore. I bought it because it was there, having never heard of it or its author, and I’m glad I saw it and picked it up.
That’s not to say it is without flaws, however. There were moments during the narrative where I had to remind myself of the protagonist’s age because there were a few times I couldn’t believe he was so dense as to not see what was going on—then again, I’m reading the events with the added benefit of 51 years of life experience and horror fandom. But even later, during his teen years, there’s an incident where, again, alarm bells should have been going off, red flags going up, and an anthropomorphized cartoon cricket telling the narrator to get the hell out of there that kind of pulled me just a little out of the story. But as he says in the beginning, “As is often the case, remembering one thing helps you remember another, and as you learn new things about your old life, memories that you thought were insignificant (or at the very least irrelevant) parts of your overall story are suddenly its foundation.” So we can’t really hold it against our young narrator when, at the time, he had so little of the full picture. But there were definitely times I thought This kid is just purposely shaking hands with danger.
However, none of that affected my overall enjoyment of the book. I REALLY dug it and hope I can find more Auerbach; I’m definitely curious to see what else he’s written. PENPAL is highly recommended to horror fans who are tired of the same horror novel retreads every six months. Or to people who just like a good book.