Bad Man
by Dathan Auerbach
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.
❃❃Bad Man releases August 7th❃❃
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Momma Says: 2 stars⭐⭐
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.
❃❃ARC provided by NetGalley and Doubleday Books
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