Bad Man: A Novel

Dathan Auerbach

Aug 2018 · Sold by Anchor

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

Always on the hunt for something creepy, I took one look at the blurb for Bad Man and knew I had to read it. I suppose it did deliver on the creepy, but those parts were few and far between, mixed in with confusing conversations that went nowhere, lots of details about working nights in a grocery store, and a ton of confusion. More than once, I found myself rereading passages to see if I missed something, anything to show me where that passage was leading. In most cases, I didn't find that elusive something. There is some suspense surrounding the grocery store and some of the characters, but suspense only works if the story holds the reader's interest. This one didn't. To put it bluntly, I was bored out of my mind for most of this book. Ben's twisted dreams did provide some moments of possible creepiness, at least until he woke up. Ben is the epitome of unreliable, but again, that only works if his tale is interesting. Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I kept reading, hoping for something exciting to happen. The ending did pick up and was certainly weird, but I wouldn't necessarily say it was scary enough to classify it as horror. What I ended up with was a five-star blurb and promising story with a one-star delivery and several hours of reading time that I can never get back.

5 Well-Earned Stars Review by Angelique Late Night Reviewer Up All Night w/ Books Blog Nothing moved. But nothing felt still. Terrifying, dark and fearful things come in all shapes and sizes and bad things tend to happen when we least expect them to. You’ll find questions, answers and more questions in Dathan Auerbach’s latest novel, Bad Man. Finding yourself in a small Floridian town where the setting is so distinctively well done that you can feel the heat and sweat on your arms as you walk through each scenario. Meeting first and foremost the two characters which make the story, Ben and Eric, Ben being the older brother and Eric being the very young brother. On a trip to the local supermarket, and in a split second of moving his eyes from his brother, Ben is left with more than just an empty bathroom, he is left with a hole in his heart and a piece of his life missing. The characters from the balding, crude supermarket owner to Ben’s stepmother who still dreams of her missing baby boy makes you feel like you know these people. You feel what they feel and you wish to help make it better but as another twist or detail gets added you find yourself helpless but intrigued to continue even as the details gets more eerie. That fire, Ben knew now, had been hope. Following Ben through his struggle and pain and never ending hope, from the moment of Eric’s first appearance to the search and places where he could be, up to the end, is emotional. Not just for the loss of his little brother but maybe at times the loss of his sanity. It isn’t always easy reading a book that identifies with so many things happening in real life, but it’s worth it. Keep reading, it’s hard not to, until you find what you are looking for.

The book is hard to put down, this is for certain. It's bloated but you do become invested. What really brings the rating down was the wholly unsatisfying conclusion. Not unsatisfying in a good "mysterious" way, but rather a disappointing "i can't believe everything amounted to this" kind of way. So be warned. Won't go out of my way to reccomend but will say give it a shot if anyone were to ask.

About the author

DATHAN AUERBACH was born in the southern U.S. and has lived there for most of his life. In 2011, he began posting a series of stories to a forum dedicated to horror. After a Kickstarter campaign that raised over 1000% of its goal, he was able to release the revised and expanded versions of his story as the novel Penpal.

www.1000Vultures.com