Sandwich Joe
Penpal is genuinely, persistently creepy. Dathan Auerbach taps into something true about memory: we don’t experience our own pasts as continuous narrative — we experience them as fragments, and the spaces between are where this book lives.
The writing style is definitely a strange choice. There’s a formal quality to the prose that initially feels like a mismatch for the material. But it ends up serving the horror in an unexpected way, that the emotional distance reads less like a stylistic miscalculation and more like a man narrating events he still can’t fully metabolize. Whether that’s intentional or a happy accident, it works.
The ending, however, doesn’t quite stick the landing. Maybe it’s because it’s a bit rushed or maybe it just resolves too much. But for a debut novel that started as a series of Reddit posts, it has no business being this good.
Penpal is genuinely, persistently creepy. Dathan Auerbach taps into something true about memory: we don’t experience our own pasts as continuous narrative — we experience them as fragments, and the spaces between are where this book lives.
The writing style is definitely a strange choice. There’s a formal quality to the prose that initially feels like a mismatch for the material. But it ends up serving the horror in an unexpected way, that the emotional distance reads less like a stylistic miscalculation and more like a man narrating events he still can’t fully metabolize. Whether that’s intentional or a happy accident, it works.
The ending, however, doesn’t quite stick the landing. Maybe it’s because it’s a bit rushed or maybe it just resolves too much. But for a debut novel that started as a series of Reddit posts, it has no business being this good.