It is one thing for a book to be oblique in its presentation, but to pair that with an almost oppressive length makes for a less than stellar reading experience. That is not say that Dathan Auerbach’s novel Bad Man is a bad book, but it is totally not what I expected it to be. I have not read his debut, the Reddit sensation Penpal (although I have heard what it is about and it chilled me to the bone), but this book does make me at least very curious about what he puts out next if he can learn to edit and take away some, but not all of the ambiguity in his writing. After a startling prologue where a pair of young boys finds a body in the woods, we are introduced to Ben and Eric, two half-brothers 12 years apart who are sent on a mission to the big local supermarket, where, in a split second, Eric goes missing under Ben’s watch. Five years after that, Ben, who is crippled from an automobile accident, is wracked with guilt over the incident, his home life a constant reminder of what is lost. Whether out of desperation or obsession (it is never made quite clear), he takes a job at the supermarket where Eric went missing. The horror at the center of this book is a vague, and its true nature always rests in the shadows like the work of Ramsey Campbell and Iain Reid, where character’s intentions like that of Ben’s co-worker Marty or his cruel boss Bill Palmer are never explored beyond Ben’s fractured perception. It leads to the book’s best scenes, where something innocuous like a stuffed rhino, a baler and a birthday cake become terrifying and tragic harbingers and a little piece on the idea of hope that is brilliant, but also the book’s poor qualities, like its sloppy spatial logic and its habit to leave too much unsaid, making the book’s 379 page count downright overkill. Still, this is a haunting book with a deep dark black heart that won’t be easy to forget.
Rating: 4/5
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