I read a Kindle edition of Penpal.
Genre: Horror
Publisher: 1000vultures
Originally published: June, 2012
Pages: 252 (paperback)
Blurb by the publisher:
In an attempt to make sense of his own mysterious and unsettling childhood memories, a man begins to reconstruct his past. As the games and adventures of his youth become engulfed by a larger story, he finds that it forms a tapestry of unbelievable horror that he never could have expected. Each chapter completes a different piece of the puzzle for both you and the narrator, and by the end of it all, you will wish that you could forget what he never knew.
My thoughts:
Penpal is a book that I’ve seen pop up from time to time as a recommended horror novel, and I downloaded it to my kindle years ago, and then I kind of forgot about it. Then when I was traveling to Bucharest, I packed my Kindle with me, and I was scrolling through my library. There it was, and I was intrigued once again.
We meet our protagonist (who remains nameless throughout the book) when he’s grown up and is looking back on certain mysterious and creepy events that happened to him, his family and friends while growing up.
Every chapter of this book really does feel like a puzzle piece that slowly but surely makes a complete and horrific picture.
We get the sense of the protagonist being stalked very early on in the book, but it’s not until the final pieces of the puzzle is put into place that the reader is actually able to paint the whole picture, and understand just how creepy and sad this story actually is.
I found Penpal to be horror perfection for my taste, and I really liked the fact that the protagonist remains unnamed throughout the whole story. It kind of adds to the mystery of it all.
The voice of the character portraits the mind of a young boy as well as an adult man looking back on his life. It’s an interesting concept to look at events like the ones in this story through the eyes of a child. One that the world has yet to be tainted by all the evil that is happening in the world.
Auerbach has built up a great story with a good pace that instantly grabbed a hold of me as a reader and took me on a journey of stalker creepiness where I thought I had an idea of what was going on, but it was hard to know for sure.
It’s hard to say much more about this story without spoiling it, so I won’t.
I loved this story, and I highly recommend it to the horror lovers out there who haven’t read it yet!
Click on the Bookdepository banner below to get your own copy with free shipping, make up your own mind, and let me know what you think of it💛
Christina de Vries 