A lot has been said about Penpal being derived from a Reddit thread. To me, this only made it more interesting. I’m a huge fan of creepypasta. Online ghost stories meant to be pasted into message boards and chain emails are my jam. When done well, they give a sense of discovery I struggle to feel elsewhere, putting you in a space where you’re never a hundred percent sure how much of what you’re seeing is made up. For many it’s something that’s looked back on with a mixture of fondness and embarrassment. Personally I think it’s weird that we talk about all this like it’s happening in the past. People are still making these kinds of stories, they happen to be more elaborate. The shape of the internet has changed so that unless your idea involves moving images or puzzles, it’s harder to get invested. So what’s an author to do but solidify all that data into dead trees? In 2011, Dathan Auerbach put up a kickstarter to turn his post about a childhood stalker into a novel. You’d think this would be fairly straightforward, but I can’t say it makes the cut. The stories are told in a classic un-fiction style, with an introduction setting the stage for a tale taken from the author’s real life experiences in childhood. And I do mean stories. There’s about five of them inside, each separate but building upon the one that came before. Immediately your sense of verisimilitude might be broken by just how wordy this guy is. Granted, I’m a fine one to talk about this considering the previous sentence, though I can’t help but feel this all only makes sense if he grew up to study English Literature at university.

Despite that, I like what’s on offer here. There’s a real sense of pacing and grisly detail that forces you to think about what you’re reading. I picked up on a strong theme of memory and felt smart for figuring it out. But then the author lifts off the lid too early by talking about how the main character sometimes wakes up in the wrong bunk in his room. Briefly I thought I’d have to toss this in the pile of media containing questionable depictions of Dissociative Identity Disorder. I won’t say whether I was right, but tipping your hat that much about the unreliability of your narrator puts a damper on what’s next. The fact that the central antagonist is a mysterious creature lurking in the woods doesn’t help either. As a fan of this genre, I was half expecting Slenderman to show up. Luckily it quickly takes its own direction and quite a few lines got a shiver out of me. It’s simply that I can’t help but feel many of the unanswered questions key to the genre are in fact logical consistencies in this case. The timeline bounces about a lot and it’s often hard to tell how old this kid is supposed to be. The chapter where the protagonist teenage boy’s (yes, that’s a verb now) his way through an awkward movie date with an older girl is easily the worst. I recommend you skip it.

As for how it works as an adaptation, I can’t help but keep coming back to that word. Adaptation. There’s absolutely no way to convince me I’m reading this on a partially melted Nexus 7 in my childhood bedroom. Not when I’m very clearly an adult stuck in a cramped train car plowing through it in broad daylight. I must admit that’s more of a “me” problem. If you do pick this up I recommend waiting until midnight and keeping a flashlight handy. At the very least I’m glad someone attempted this kind of work, even if it was only once. There’s an illustration of a discarded police report in the back that smacks of missed potential. I don’t want a hypothetical sequel coming in a box or anything, but more attention given to presentation and a shorter word count could have made it shine. Instead, I’ll only think of this tale in passing.