Penpal

The novel’s central antagonist, the pen pal remains shrouded in ambiguity to heighten the character’s menace. Consequently, the novel includes scant exposition on the pen pal’s identity, though Dathan Auerbach provides several possible leads for interpretation. One thing the novel establishes with almost completely certainty is that the pen pal is an adult man, implicitly much older than the narrator and Josh.

The pen pal first becomes aware of the narrator when he receives the narrator’s Balloon Project letter. The pen pal’s immediate reaction to the note is likely to surveil the narrator during the time between receiving his note and sending the narrator the first photo. It’s unclear if the pen pal always lived in the narrator’s first neighborhood or started to live under the narrator’s house after becoming obsessed with him. In any case, the pen pal uses his anonymity to approach the narrator and Josh’s snow cone stand without eliciting attention; to take numerous photos of the narrator, using a Polaroid camera; to follow the narrator and Josh during several of their excursions into the woods; and later, to trail the narrator in a car and then use it to injure Veronica. In one of the final scenes, the pen pal uses Veronica’s phone to convince the narrator to come to The Dirt Theatre, where he sits next to the narrator during the movie.

The pen pal’s modus operandi involves kidnapping his target child and leaving a note to make it appear as though the child became dissatisfied with their life and chose to run away. Although the pen pal nearly abducts the narrator, the narrator’s grit and natural skill for navigation allow him to escape. As the narrator grows older, the pen pal becomes convinced that he’s too weak to attempt the narrator’s abduction a second time. The pen pal thus settles for Josh, observing their uncanny physical resemblance to one another. The pen pal doesn’t resolve his obsession with the narrator by abducting Josh, however, which becomes clear when Josh’s corpse is discovered: The novel implies that at some point, the pen pal forcibly dyed Josh’s hair brown like the narrator’s and dressed Josh in old clothes that the narrator left behind during his move to another house. The novel suggests that the pen pal willingly decided to die with Josh as a proxy for the narrator, since he contracted Josh’s father to inadvertently bury them together. The narrator’s mother observes a smile of “bliss” frozen on the pen pal’s face, suggesting that he fulfilled his plans to his satisfaction.

Although the novel never reveals the pen pal’s true identity, Auerbach uses the menacing nature of the world around the narrator to imply that anyone could be the pen pal. He introduces several characters who briefly appear and are distinguished by certain physical traits like noticeable scars or an intense capacity for perspiration. Their appearance is meant to immerse readers in a sense of dread, suggesting that anyone could be the ordinary man the narrator’s mother finds entangled with Josh at the end. This emphasizes Loss of Innocence and Trust in an Idyllic Small Town as a theme.