Penpal

Content Warning: This section depicts child death.

Dathan Auerbach’s novel traces one character’s change in worldview as he gradually grows up to accept that the world is a cruel and cold place. Auerbach parallels his unnamed narrator’s realizations with the gradual development of the town in which he lives. In this way, the novel can also be read as a critique on nostalgia and urban development.

The narrator and his mother move into the neighborhood when the town it’s attached to is still small. The family’s financial status provides the impetus for their move; they’re drawn to the neighborhood because the relatively low cost of living enables them to keep a home in a suburban community. The narrator regards his earliest years in the town as a happy time: “I thought my home was as close to a palace as one could hope for” (14). His rosy perspective of the neighborhood extends to the woods behind his home, his oldest play area and the site of many excursions that feed his imagination. At this point, his fear of monsters remains rooted in the imaginary world. The threat of the woods remains abstract, kept at a distance by the safety of the real world. The narrator’s first interactions with his pen pal show how easy it is to pierce that veil of safety, resulting in the attempt to abduct the narrator and take him into the woods. While Josh’s friendship helps the narrator to feel safe in the woods again, it exposes him to the same threat and ultimately causes Josh’s death.

Throughout the narrator’s childhood, the people he meets in the town continuously infringe on the sense of security he gets from his neighborhood. For instance, while he perceives Mrs. Maggie as a warm elderly woman who never fails to extend her hospitality to him and Josh, his mother warns him to decline Mrs. Maggie’s invitations to enter her home. Even though the narrator’s mother explains that Mrs. Maggie has Alzheimer’s disease, she never fully explains why the narrator must always decline her invitations, as if they’re a pretense for something sinister. Similarly, each interaction he has with a stranger from the town is tinged with an air of menace, from the police officer with a large burn scar to the sweaty ticket seller at the cinema the narrator frequents. All of them are potentially the narrator’s pen pal, though Auerbach purposely leaves the pen pal’s real identity ambiguous so that his menace sustains through to the novel’s end, even after he’s confirmed dead.

In Chapter 6, the teen narrator exists in a version of the town that has already entered a state of decay. He frequents a poorly maintained cinema called The Dirt Theatre, next to an abandoned mall that is rumored to have been haunted by a monster that lived under its floors. The fact that the urban legend surrounding the mall mirrors the narrator’s discovery that someone was living under his old house ties his personal experience to the town’s history. Other parts of the town likewise hint at a dark history. Just as the narrator finds abandoned developments in the thick of the woods, he finds his own house left to rot, giving his pen pal free rein to decorate his old room with evidence of his transgression.

The implied subtext of this parallel is that while the town grew, it didn’t necessarily improve or foster better social conditions. As the novel ends, the narrator has conflicting emotions about becoming friends with Josh, regretting that their friendship led to Josh’s demise. This regret could easily extend to moving to the town in the first place, pursuing a better life and instead living in fear of the consequences.