Bad Man: A Novel

Bad Man is the type of book that gives off a creepy vibe even though it doesn’t have a single ghost or spooky supernatural creature in it. What caught my attention first was the prose. The book almost read like a poem albeit in complete sentences. It had a sort of sing-song flow to it which I was captured by almost immediately. The story in itself was not complex, but several of the characters were so messed up that it often made me stop and think. Ben is a twenty-year-old man who rides a train of guilt every day for five years since he lost his three-year-old little brother, Eric, at the local grocery store. The setting of the story seemed to be very rural with deep pockets of woodsy areas and only a few businesses scattered around. Looking for work, Ben’s last choice would be to work at the grocery store his little brother was kidnapped at. He finds himself working as a stock boy to make ends meet. The ending was absolutely so shocking I had to read it over twice. This book had the nuances of a horror novel with the truisms of real life—a truly skin-crawling experience.