This is a tough one.

I generally avoid self-published horror. I've simply been burned too many times in the past, and I have had much greater success in choosing reading material from writers who go the traditional route of conventional editors and publishing houses. Sure, I'm missing out on some good stuff, but I think I'm coming out ahead in the bargain.

So I didn't read Dathan Auerbach's Penpal, despite hearing nearly unanimous praise about the novel. I have been interested, and I just ordered a copy, but I never got around to it before being requested to read and review Bad Man.

As I said, Bad Man is a difficult one. It isn't the easiest book in the world to read. I credit Auerbach for going in a decidedly non-commercial direction with this novel. He also avoids most of the generic cliches (with the exception of using the incredibly overused missing person plot), and he doesn't play it easy. Not with his characters, not with his readers, and presumably not with himself.

Beginning Bad Man is like entering a dark, scary tunnel. The reader is introduced to Ben, a rural young adult who suffers a bitter cross. Five years prior to the events of the book, Ben takes his little brother to a grocery store, and somehow loses the boy. Despite frantic searches, the younger sibling is never found.

Now Ben and his family are haunted by the loss. It being a depressed local economy, he is forced to take a job at the very store in which the disappearance occurred. Strange, sinister things begin to happen to Ben and his motley co-workers.

Ben also continues to look for clues to his brother's disappearance, even while the police and his own family have given up hope.

Bad Man takes place in Ben's head, and it is a shadowy, paranoid, oppressed place to be. He begins to find hints about the five-year-old mystery, or perhaps they are merely tricks his tortured mind is playing on him. Everyone around him seems to be an enemy with secret agendas.

I was unsure about whether I liked Bad Man while I was reading it, but the novel won me over by the end. It surely isn't a typical horror novel, and Bad Man is much more ambitious than the norm in an ever-predictable genre.

Plus, Bad Man scores points for the most frightening piece of industrial machinery since King gave us The Mangler. I've used one of those monstrous cardboard balers, and they are scary indeed.

Bad Man unfolds gradually, and rather than try for the usual shock/surprise ending, Auerbach allows the book's dread to mount and for the revelations to emerge with excruciating deliberation. It's literally painful to witness Ben's struggles.

Yes, Bad Man is a scary book, and I hope I haven't scared off readers with this review. We need more writers like Dathan Auerbach to challenge us, and to challenge the potential of horror fiction. I highly recommend it.

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