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 … 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.
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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 first thing that grabbed me about this book is the shopping cart on the cover.
I used to work in a grocery store so I can identify with some parts of the story.
This is an emotional, heart wrenching story.
Unforgettable characters, that’s for sure.
“Bad Man” by Dathan Auerbach
Everyone is afraid of losing someone. Whether they leave, move away or die, it hurts. But imagine if the reason they’re gone is because of you?
Ben lost his baby brother Eric in a grocery store. One minute he was holding his hand, and for the next five years, he seems to be the only one looking for him. His family has emotionally closed themselves off, and the police have moved on to more solvable cases. Ben blames himself, but deep down he feels that something just isn’t right. Kids don’t just vanish, especially in the small, sleepy town he lives in.
Finances being tight, a now twenty-year-old Ben takes the only job he can get: stocker at the very store Eric went missing from. Strangely, everything about the store seems just a bit off. Eric’s missing person’s flyer is gone; Ben finds the stuffed toy the boy had with him that day in the ‘Lost and Found’ box; and his boss is shady from the start. His co-workers are nice enough, but they all have secrets. While he works, Ben continues to replace flyers, go door to door, and talk to anyone who will listen to him about his brother.
Ben starts to feel Eric everywhere. He thinks he sees him in the tree line off in the distance. The more he searches, the deeper the fear of what he’s going to find grows. But he refuses to give up. He knows something is hiding in plain sight. Twisting and turning in every direction, Ben is sure Eric is out there. He has to keep digging…even if it ends up to be his own grave.
Dathan Auerbach has captured the genuine terror of finding what you should have stopped looking for long ago.
Reviewed by Leslie A. Borghini, author of “Angel Heat” published by Suspense Publishing, an imprint of Suspense Magazine
Decent writing but too long for the plot and too much misdirection. Events from the character’s past should have been revealed earlier, possibly in a more linear fashion. There’s an interesting point to be made by the conclusion, but is lost before the finale.