This guide spotlights the intimate cast of Dathan Auerbach’s Penpal, where a suburban childhood is slowly dismantled by an unseen presence. Through fractured memories and delayed revelations, each character’s choices braid into a single, dreadful truth. The result is a haunting portrait of love, secrecy, and the long shadow of obsession.
Main Characters
The Narrator
The Narrator is the book’s anchor and lens, reconstructing his childhood through “mental archaeology” to make sense of scattered, traumatic memories. His non-linear storytelling mirrors the The Unreliability and Fragmentation of Memory, pulling readers into the puzzle as he uncovers how innocent adventures and school projects concealed something predatory. Inquisitive and imaginative as a child yet haunted and driven as an adult, he is determined to learn how his best friend vanished and why danger kept circling his life. Defined by deep bonds—with his closest friend, a protective parent, and a teenage love—he ultimately discovers that an obsessive stranger has shaped his past, costing him both Friendship and Loyalty and a chance at normalcy. His journey traces a harrowing Loss of Innocence, ending in clarity that offers understanding but no peace.
The Stalker / Penpal
The Stalker (also called the Penpal) is a static, malevolent force whose fixation defines the protagonist’s life. Patient and methodical, he escalates from distant surveillance—creepy Polaroids, planted balloons—to invasive trespass, secretly dwelling beneath a childhood home while cataloging moments that were never his to own. His “love” looks like possession, eliminating anyone who might share the boy’s attention, and culminating in abduction and a brutal hit-and-run. A portrait of Stalking and Obsession taken to its extreme, he leaves trauma that outlives him, even after he is violently confronted and killed in the wake of what he’s done.
Josh
Josh is the protagonist’s closest friend and the emotional center of the novel—bright, loyal, and always ready to explore the woods, build rafts, and map their small world. His warmth steadies the Narrator, making their friendship a beacon amid encroaching dread. The mystery of his disappearance becomes the story’s driving question, and the truth—revealed through the map they were making and the birthday surprise he never finished—exposes how peril crept into ordinary play. Josh’s fate is the most devastating expression of innocence destroyed: a good kid caught in the blast radius of an obsession that was never about him, yet took his life all the same.
Supporting Characters
The Narrator's Mother
The Narrator’s Mother is a vigilant protector and reluctant keeper of terrible secrets, making abrupt decisions—like moving homes—that only later reveal themselves as acts of survival. Her love is fierce but complicated; by shielding her son, she fragments his memory and postpones truths that will eventually rupture their trust. When she finally confesses what she discovered beneath their house and what was found afterward, her burdened silence becomes the novel’s moral fault line.
Veronica
Veronica—Josh’s older sister—reenters the protagonist’s life in adolescence as a chance at normalcy and first love. Their night out at the Dirt Theatre becomes a brief promise of healing before the past collides with the present in a calculated hit-and-run. Her death, followed by text messages sent from her phone, turns romance into psychological torture and proves the boy can never simply outgrow what haunts him.
Mrs. Maggie
Mrs. Maggie is the elderly neighbor whose Alzheimer’s renders her kind, lonely, and terrifyingly unreliable—mirroring the story’s fractured recollections. She confuses neighborhood children with her lost sons and waits for her husband, Tom, to come home, making her gentle gifts and muddled warnings (“Tom’s home”) both sweet and sinister. Her decline and the biohazard cleanup after her death suggest she, too, was drawn into the Stalker’s orbit, a chilling echo of how vulnerability invites intrusion.
Minor Characters
Josh's Father
Josh’s Father is a hardworking, grieving parent who discovers the truth of his son’s fate, kills the man responsible, and conceals it to spare his wife further devastation—turning private justice into a lifelong secret.
Chris
Chris is a kindergarten classmate turned high school friend, a casual bridge between past and present who helps reconnect the protagonist with Veronica and unwittingly ushers the old danger back into view.
The Police Officer
The Police Officer with the burn scar is a recurring emblem of institutional failure: present at crises yet powerless to prevent the next, his appearances underline how official protection arrives too late.
Character Relationships & Dynamics
The story’s core is the bond between the Narrator and Josh, a wholehearted friendship that transforms wooded trails, schoolyards, and backyard projects into a sanctuary—until those same places become stages for someone else’s design. Their adventures, especially the shared map, symbolize a childhood built together; when that map leads one of them into the predator’s path, the friendship’s purity makes the loss unbearable.
The Narrator’s relationship with his mother is a cycle of love, fear, and delayed truth. She acts decisively to protect him—moving homes, controlling what he learns—yet her secrecy fractures his sense of self and pushes him, as an adult, to exhume the very memories she tried to bury. Their late conversations recast the past, revealing that the cost of protection was paid in confusion, mistrust, and a grief they carried in different silences.
Opposing them is the Stalker’s one-sided attachment to the boy, a possessive “love” that isolates its target by erasing anyone close to him. Veronica’s brief romance with the Narrator becomes intolerable to the intruder and is violently ended; Josh’s closeness makes him a target by proximity. Even acts meant to heal—like Josh’s father seeking justice and hiding the truth—tighten the story’s web of secrecy, binding families and neighbors into concentric circles around a single obsession. In Penpal, friendships and families form one faction and the lone predator the other, but the imbalance of power ensures that even the strongest bonds are tested, broken, or forever changed.