It’s not full-blown horror, this is a slow burn, an intelligently plotted out and intrinsically woven story, where each part is a cog in a larger machine that’s slowly turning. I found the characters within Penpal to be believable, engaging and fully formed – which ensured that I was fully invested in their plight and the horrors that unfolded.īut it is the horror, it’s the creeping unease that Auerbach fills his prose with, that pulls the reader in further to this unraveling nightmare of a story. It read like a more brutal and horror infused version of Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’ such is the genius of the storytelling. I thought the storytelling was crisp and original, I really enjoyed the disjointed narrative (some of the stories happening before the previous one etc). Since finishing this book I’ve seen that the reviews for it vary from one star (a great many) and five star (equally as many), it would appear you either love it or you hate it – like Marmite in a way – and I can tell you now, I bloody love Marmite, and this offering from Auerbach was a breath of fresh air. Penpal is an intelligent piece of storytelling, one that I feel you get more out of, the more you put into it – and for me going in knowing nothing about the book really helped me jump straight in. ‘Sometimes forgetting is the gift that we give ourselves, and when we do, it’s back to the void, and it’s time for more guesses toward a better life.’ Fans of interconnected short stories will love the mastery on show and those that love a good old horror novel can also sit back and enjoy how Auerbach weaves this macabre and brutal tale. But I guess you could also define it as a collection, so it works on two levels. I’d say it was more a disjointed novel told in a unique narrative that I’ve not seen done in fiction before. I discovered after reading that this book originally started out as a NOSLEEP REDDIT article, each of the stories within this book were individual posts, and then the author decided to polish it up and release it as a collection.

I think that’s why I enjoyed it so much, I was a blank canvass and Auerbach spattered me with the creep factor so much, I came out of this book like a Jackson Pollock painting – it was beautifully horrific, intelligently written and I was pretty much blown away.

I decided to jump right on in and didn’t even read the blurb before cracking open those pages.

They said that it freaked them out no end and well, with a recommendation like that from someone I trust, I just had to discover this book for myself. I put out a request near my birthday for some horror books to purchase and one person recommended Penpal. I love finding a book by an author that I know nothing about, and that is the case for Penpal and Dathan Auerbach.

Penpal by Dathan Auerbach