And as hope comforts us, it becomes easier and easier to forget that it too was in the jar that Pandora carried. It just numbs and reassures, until it can consume the desperate for the sake of its own brilliant incandescence. Through it all, Ben remains buoyed by hope, about which Auerbach writes: “It doesn’t fix anything. Also keeping one eye on Ben is local policeman James Duchaine, whose motivations are hard to discern. He also has co-workers, a strange cast that includes his buddies Marty and Frank, the bakery’s misanthrope, Miss Beverly, and a cashier named Chelsea. Ben is under the thumb of the shop’s cruel manager, Bill Palmer. What follows is a heady, puzzling, and oddly gripping exercise in depicting a small town as a macabre place filled with everyday horrors ranging from a child’s stuffed animal to a gruesome industrial accident.

Out of desperation, Ben gets a job as a stocker at the very store where his brother vanished. His father is largely absent, and his stepmother is crippled by grief. Five years later, Ben is a wreck, a heavy, slow adolescent who’s partially lame from a childhood accident. A prologue finds Ben and his 3-year-old brother, Eric, in a grocery store in a desolate stretch of North Florida-and just as surely as he was there, Eric disappears. This time, he lands at Doubleday’s horror-heavy Blumhouse Books imprint. This nasty little slice of Southern gothic is Auerbach’s ( Penpal, 2012) second novel, following his popular Reddit-fueled, self-published debut.

After a young man loses his little brother, he searches for him desperately while working as a stocker at a grocery store.

Dathan auerbach books