Penpal by Dathan Auerbach

From Goodreads:
How much do you remember about your childhood?

In Penpal, a man investigates the seemingly unrelated bizarre, tragic, and horrific occurrences of his childhood in an attempt to finally understand them. Beginning with only fragments of his earliest years, you'll follow the narrator as he discovers that these strange and horrible events are actually part of a single terrifying story that has shaped the entirety of his life and the lives of those around him.

I super inhale-read this. 

This book sort of reminded me of Slenderman, which I think originated in the same way this story did, on reddit as scary stories before becoming more popular. For a while, I thought the bad guy would be the Slenderman himself. 

I read this over the course of a day. At first I didn't think this was a super-scary read, but more unsettling. But the more I read, and the more I thought about it when I wasn't reading it, I became more jumpy and scared. This is a book that you think about when you are not reading it. It was done in such a way that the narrator could be anyone. 

This book succeeds because of the anonymity of the narrator. It's written in an out-of-sequence narrative, and it jumps around a lot, mostly in the narrator's childhood with them looking back on things and figuring out the strangeness and creepiness of the events that plagued his childhood life. A minor annoyance that I had with this book is that I found it a bit unrealistic that the mom didn't tell her child even the smallest thing about what was going on and after a few weeks, allowed him to go back out into the woods with very minor supervision. Besides that I didn't really have any complaints.

Since it's written with such an anonymous narrator that could be anyone, especially with his run-of-the-mill childhood, the characters were extra relatable because even on a base level, such as, having a childhood best friend and exploring as a kid, there is a lot to relate to here. Everything that happens in this book to the main character could happen to anyone, and I think that's what makes it work as well as it does. There are parts, that thinking about it even now, make my skin crawl with terror and paranoia. This book really does play into your paranoia. I feel like if I hadn't read this while on break at work, and while it was super slow, I would have been more jumpy while reading this and realizing what was really going on.

Penpal is a great book. It was a really quick read for me, and is really effective in its storytelling. It becomes more and more chilling and creepy as the story progresses and you realize exactly what is going on. Apart from a few minor issues, I loved this book. At first I was going to give this book 4/5, but after finishing it and thinking about it, I've decided to bump it up to 4.5/5. I recommend it for any fan of horror novels, and would advise sleeping with the lights on after finishing it.