Allie Interrupted

Rating 2/5 ☕☕

Bad Man is a thriller by the author of the widely enjoyed Pen Pal, Dathan Auerbach. It is a theoretically short novel coming in at about 379 pages, though felt like it shaved several years off of my life. Let’s unpack this messy read together. Caution to anyone who is hoping to explore this title themselves, there are spoilers ahead!

Summary:

This book centers around the tragic life our narrator Ben, a gloomy teenager who has a pretty bleak existence. He walks through life lugging around a lot of extra weight- literally and metaphorically. After sustaining a pretty severe injury in a car accident as a child, Ben struggles with his mobility, which overtime causes him to put on quite a few pounds. In addition to the physical weight, he’s also carrying the burden of being the one who was tasked with supervising his kid brother Eric when he was snatched up at their local grocery store never to be seen or heard from again. At the opening of our story, we learn that Ben has taken a job at the very same grocery store where this tragedy has occurred, and as the back of the book summary tells us- things are going to get a little freaky. We spend the majority of the exposition of this book following Ben to and from his night shifts stocking shelves at the grocery store. We meet his generic male coworkers, his mildly shifty bottom-line obsessed boss, and the snarky old woman who works in the bakery… and that’s pretty much it for the first two thirds of the book. We get a few strange happenings- Ben has some weird dreams, Eric’s missing person posters occasionally are removed, and most notably the toy Eric has with him when he vanished turns up in the shop. It’s not until the final 120 pages or so that the plot really starts moving toward a resolution- and it is hauling ass. We sprint through quite a few twists and turns and end up on what may be the most unsatisfying ending I have read in recent years.

Review:

This book got off to a painfully slow start, and in my opinion the characters just weren’t redeeming enough to warrant spending so much time soaking up the banal with them. I will say I may be slightly predisposed to feeling a bit disconnected from Ben and his grocery store chums, as I don’t often enjoy stories that center entirely on men. The female characters in this story were few and far between and did very little to move the plot. Deidra, the Cotter girls and even Marty’s mom were all downtrodden and damaged figures that lacked any other defining characteristics- this made it hard to empathize with them and see them as characters with any significant depth. Even our antagonist, Beverly, felt poorly developed which really contributed to the disjointed and underwhelming ending.

With so much of the booking being spent on what I can only describe as atmospheric development, it was genuinely jarring how abruptly this book ended. The “plot twist” made it feel like the book itself was just ready to get the story over with. I was left feeling so unsatisfied with the ending that I had to skim back through to make sure I hadn’t missed something! I was left with so many questions: You mean to tell me three people have been living in this small town’s only grocery store for five years? Who is the feral little blond boy, and why does Beverly have him? Why did we spend so much of the last third of the book talking about The Black Water School if it was going to be such a minuscule afterthought in relation to the conclusion of the story? And most importantly why does blondie want to make Ben’s life so miserable? This lack of motive was really the ultimate downfall of what could have been a decent ending. With how long it took me to get through this book I hesitate to say this- but I just needed a little bit more to wrap things up more effectively.

I fear that the answer to most of my questions can likely be dismissed with the excuse that Ben was an unreliable narrator. We were given little glimpses of Ben grappling with the guilt and reconciling with the fact that he may have been mistreating Eric and potentially repressing those memories. His obsession with finding his brother- to the point of physically battering his body, while searching desperately for leads, his disturbing dreams and the strained relationship with his family and community in the aftermath of tragedy seemed to be a sort of penance for the responsibility he felt for the loss of his brother, whether it was warranted or not.

Ben’s laborious navigation of his internal world was one of the strengths of this book- and I wish there was more of it toward the end! I love when authors play with dissonance between memory/self-perception and reality, it just would’ve been so much more satisfying to see this plot line come full circle in a more tangible way. Another point in favor of this book were the few masterful instances of suspense that were peppered throughout the drawn-out beginning/mid-section of the story. While the development of the story may have been lacking there is no denying that Auerbach has a strong command of language when it comes to eliciting unsettling imagery. He manages to bring subtlety and intensity together in a way that definitely got my heart pounding on a few occasions.

Final Thoughts:

I’ve settled on a two-latte rating for Bad Man because the combination of a meandering start and a premature ending just don’t sit well with me. It did make me curious to read Pen Pal, Auerbach’s debut novel, (please don’t ask me why I didn’t start with that one, I couldn’t tell you) so I will be adding that to my list for the month of May! Based on the glimpses of masterfully crafted suspense and the glowing reviews I have seen from other readers- I am hopeful that Pen Pal will be a little more satisfying. I was a NoSleep subreddit frequent flyer as an edgy teen, so I know that Auerbach (aka 1000Vultures) is more than capable of creepy, and I’m looking forward to seeing how his reddit series takes shape as a full-fledged novel!

As always, these are just my thoughts, and I am very excited to hear yours! Please consider subscribing for future book ratings and reviews, and in the meantime lets connect on socials to keep the book talks rolling.