Bad Man by Dathan Auerbach

Synopsis: Reddit horror sensation Dathan Auerbach delivers a devilishly dark novel about a young boy who goes missing, and the brother who won’t stop looking for him.

Eric disappeared when he was three years old. Ben looked away for only a second at the grocery store, but that was all it took. His brother was gone. Vanished right into the sticky air of the Florida Panhandle.

They say you’ve got only a couple days to find a missing person. Forty-eight hours to conduct searches, knock on doors, and talk to witnesses. Two days to tear the world apart if there’s any chance of putting yours back together. That’s your window.

That window closed five years ago, leaving Ben’s life in ruins. He still looks for his brother. Still searches, while his stepmother sits and waits and whispers for Eric, refusing to leave the house that Ben’s father can no longer afford. Now twenty and desperate for work, Ben takes a night stock job at the only place that will have him: the store that blinked Eric out of existence.

Ben can feel that there’s something wrong there. With the people. With his boss. With the graffitied baler that shudders and moans and beckons. There’s something wrong with the air itself. He knows he’s in the right place now. That the store has much to tell him. So he keeps searching. Keeps looking for his baby brother, while missing the most important message of all.

That he should have stopped looking.

Review: I’m always looking for a good thriller, I’ll even say that it borders on the horror genre, so I was curious to discover the novel!

Ben’s brother disappeared more than five years ago. He was under his surveillance, but no evidence was found. But he didn’t give up. He still hopes to find him alive and the story catches up with him when he takes a job as a storekeeper in the store where he lost Eric. But this work will change his life and launch him into a quest from which he is not sure to come out in one piece, either physically or emotionally.

The atmosphere of the novel is very particular, oppressive, and if we wait to see what Ben will discover, we don’t know if we can trust him or the others. There are not many events going on and we understand that Ben is going in circles trying to find his brother, that it’s not easy, especially when you play him.

It’s pretty hard to understand what happened 5 years ago, what’s happening now, but I was really curious to find out more. However, I must say that the end remains quite open (I’m not a big fan of this kind of things), I still have so many questions and I would have liked a small suequel to complete the whole thing.

17 thoughts on “Bad Man by Dathan Auerbach

  1. Yikes! “the store has much to tell him”?? Ooh this one sounds freaky!!! Open endings though… yeah those can be tough. I like to have at least some resolution!

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