Bad Man

April 15, 2018

Every older sibling caring for a younger one has probably wished at one point that the latter would just disappear, but such a wish is furthest from Ben's mind when his three-year-old brother, Eric, vanishes without a trace during a trip to the grocery store. Ben spends the next five years scouring the town for Eric, pestering the neighbors and local police long after the case has been forgotten. Now 20 and in desperate need of money, Ben takes a job at the same store from which Eric disappeared and soon realizes that something isn't exactly right there. From Mr. Palmer, the despotic manager, to the massive baler that looms in the back room, the place seems to taunt Ben with knowledge of what may have happened to Eric. Author Auerbach, a frequent and well-known contributor to Reddit.com's NoSleep page, a forum for short horror stories, has a style well suited to short stories that unfortunately fails to adapt to a full-length novel. The characters, especially Ben, remain underdeveloped, which may lead readers to wish that this was indeed a short story. There are truly creepy moments, but they are few and far between. VERDICT A disappointingly flawed effort from one of NoSleep's best writers. An optional purchase.--Tyler Hixson, Brooklyn P.L.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2018
After a young man loses his little brother, he searches for him desperately while working as a stocker at a grocery store.This nasty little slice of Southern gothic is Auerbach's (Penpal, 2012) second novel, following his popular Reddit-fueled, self-published debut. This time, he lands at Doubleday's horror-heavy Blumhouse Books imprint. A prologue finds Ben and his 3-year-old brother, Eric, in a grocery store in a desolate stretch of North Florida--and just as surely as he was there, Eric disappears. Five years later, Ben is a wreck, a heavy, slow adolescent who's partially lame from a childhood accident. His father is largely absent, and his stepmother is crippled by grief. Out of desperation, Ben gets a job as a stocker at the very store where his brother vanished. What follows is a heady, puzzling, and oddly gripping exercise in depicting a small town as a macabre place filled with everyday horrors ranging from a child's stuffed animal to a gruesome industrial accident. Ben is under the thumb of the shop's cruel manager, Bill Palmer. He also has co-workers, a strange cast that includes his buddies Marty and Frank, the bakery's misanthrope, Miss Beverly, and a cashier named Chelsea. Also keeping one eye on Ben is local policeman James Duchaine, whose motivations are hard to discern. Through it all, Ben remains buoyed by hope, about which Auerbach writes: "It doesn't fix anything. It just numbs and reassures, until it can consume the desperate for the sake of its own brilliant incandescence. And as hope comforts us, it becomes easier and easier to forget that it too was in the jar that Pandora carried. It's the one horror of the world that wasn't loosed when she opened the lid. It's the one horror that lives in us."An unreliable protagonist and a nebulous finale may put some off, but credit Auerbach for keeping readers on the edges of their seats for the whole ride.

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June 11, 2018
Auerbach follows his first novel, 2012’s Penpal, with a dark and disturbing horror thriller set in the Florida Panhandle. One day, 15-year-old Ben takes his three-year-old brother, Eric, to a local grocery store, where Eric drops his stuffed rhino, Stampie, into a restroom toilet. While Ben is cleaning Stampie, Eric vanishes. Five years later, Ben is working as a night stocker in the same store that Eric disappeared in and remains intent on finding his brother. When a coworker informs Ben that he saw Eric months earlier, Ben’s obsession becomes manic and he begins seeing others—including his manager, the old woman who runs the bakery, and a coworker—as potential conspirators. Readers will be reminded of the young Stephen King (the store’s baler, for example, evokes King’s industrial laundry press machine in “The Mangler”), but the story unravels at the conclusion, with one too many strained sequences. The novel’s rich imagery suggests Auerbach is capable of doing better next time.

July 1, 2018
Ben was 15 when he lost his 3-year-old brother, Eric, at a local grocery store?one moment Eric was there, the next he wasn't. Five years later, Ben still papers his small town with flyers, keeps bothering the unhelpful detective on the case, and, in a move that disturbs his family, gets a night-stocker job at the very grocery store where Eric vanished. Ben confides in fellow stocker, Marty, and together the two of them begin to loosely prod into places better left unprodded. If you think The Shining set in a grocery store, you're not far off; instances of the uncanny (Eric's lost toy showing up out of nowhere) are mixed with a bevy of suspicious, sometimes unnerving personalities: the snooty manager, the grizzled baker, Ben's grieving mother. Red herrings and loose ends abound, and some readers will find the book lacks focus. But Auerbach is magnificent with atmosphere, able to conjure dread from a huge array of normally nonthreatening places. This is a horror author to watch very, very closely.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)