What This Theme Explores
Stalking and obsession in Penpal are not isolated incidents but a sustained invasion that rewrites a life from the inside out. The theme probes how fixation becomes control: how an unseen watcher can reshape memories, fracture relationships, and transform ordinary spaces into arenas of threat. It asks what it means to be the subject of someone else’s narrative without consent—and how that knowledge, once uncovered, permanently alters the self. Through the Narrator, the book explores how terror lingers not only in what happens but in how the past is reinterpreted as a long, intimate trespass.
How It Develops
Stalking and obsession first surface as deniable anomalies, then solidify into a pattern of possession. In Balloons, a school project yields an answer that is not a letter but a flood of photographs—everyday moments recorded from a distance—alongside the eerily returned “FOR STAMPS” dollar. What looks like coincidence becomes the revelation of a gaze that has been present, uninvited, all along.
That gaze tightens its grip in Footsteps, where night is weaponized: the Stalker removes the sleeping child from his bed, deposits him in the woods, and forges a “running away” note to corrode trust at home. In Boxes, the horror relocates from the periphery to the foundation—literally—when the crawlspace beneath the house is exposed as the intruder’s den, revealing that the intrusions were not visits but residency.
The obsession then becomes openly predatory. Maps pushes the danger into daylight as the stalker menaces the raft journey, converting exploration into entrapment and drawing the Narrator and his best friend Josh into a geography mapped for pursuit rather than play. In Screens, the violation turns sadistic and performative with the murder of Veronica and the hijacking of her phone, weaponizing communication itself to puppeteer grief. Finally, Friends reveals the terminal expression of obsession: unable to possess the Narrator, the stalker fashions a surrogate in Josh—abducted, altered, and entombed—proving that the fixation seeks ownership, not contact.
Key Examples
The novel’s most chilling moments reveal not just what the stalker does, but how obsession methodically converts the ordinary into instruments of domination.
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The Polaroid photographs from the Balloon Project transform a childish experiment into surveillance. The realization that the Narrator is present in every image—always captured, never addressed—exposes a pattern of watching that predates his awareness. A trivial “FOR STAMPS” dollar returns like a calling card, proof of proximity and audacity.
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The crawlspace dwelling collapses the boundary between inside and outside, safety and threat. Discovering the nest beneath the floorboards reframes the childhood home as the stalker’s lair, with blankets, bowls, and a hoard of dead animals marking a prolonged, parasitic occupation. What once felt protective becomes the architecture of entrapment.
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Impersonating the dead via Veronica’s phone shows obsession moving from body to message. By texting as her, the stalker exploits intimacy to extend his reach, turning grief into a controllable interface. The cold promise—“See you again. Soon.”—reduces human relationship to an instrument of terror.
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The final abduction exposes the logic of possession: if the true object cannot be owned, a substitute will be made. Josh’s dyed hair and coffin-scene reveal the stalker’s attempt to manufacture the Narrator’s presence, collapsing identity into a macabre replica. Obsession ends not with contact but with a tableau of enforced likeness.
Character Connections
The Stalker embodies obsession stripped of rationale, a will that defines itself solely by proximity and control. His methods—surveillance, infiltration, impersonation—show that possession for him is not about encounter but about authorship: he writes himself into the Narrator’s life by erasing boundaries and commandeering meaning. The absence of motive intensifies the horror, suggesting that fixation does not need a why to be devastating.
The Narrator is forced to live in the aftermath of someone else’s narrative. His adult reconstruction of events models how victims of stalking revisit memory as evidence, reinterpreting childhood joys as curated exposures. The cost is double: he loses friends and safety in the moment, then loses his innocence retroactively as the past is revealed to have been a performance stage-managed by another.
Josh becomes the obsession’s collateral and its final canvas. First targeted on the raft and later remade as a stand-in, he illustrates how proximity to the desired object becomes a sentence of vulnerability. His fate also clarifies the stalker’s endgame: possession is less about interaction than substitution, a grim attempt to overwrite reality with fantasy.
The Narrator’s Mother translates fear into vigilance, creating a protective regimen that veers toward secrecy and control. Her choices—check-ins, rules, withheld truths—mirror the stalker’s manipulation in form if not intent, showing how obsession distorts entire family systems. In trying to build a fortress, she inadvertently isolates her son from the context he needs to understand the threat.
Symbolic Elements
Photographs represent the asymmetry of power in surveillance: to be captured is to be possessed without consent. The images freeze time, but in Penpal they also freeze agency, turning spontaneous childhood moments into a catalog curated by the watcher.
The crawlspace is the story’s subconscious—hidden, damp, and foundational. It literalizes the idea that danger is not outside the home but embedded beneath it, an unseen chamber where the stalker’s fantasy life grows under the family’s feet.
The woods mark the threshold where play becomes pursuit. For the boys they promise exploration; for the stalker they provide concealment and control. As settings, the trees are both playground and snare, a living metaphor for the way innocence becomes cover for predation.
Contemporary Relevance
Born from a Reddit “NoSleep” series, Penpal channels today’s anxieties about visibility in a networked world. The book’s analog methods—film photos, forged notes, lurking spaces—now have digital equivalents: geotagged posts, spoofed accounts, and data trails that let strangers map a life. Cyberstalking, doxxing, and parasocial fixation amplify the same terror the novel dramatizes: that someone you do not know can curate you, collect you, and slowly claim authorship over your story. In an era of constant sharing, the boundary between being seen and being surveilled has never felt thinner.
Essential Quote
I was in every photo.
None of them were close shots. None of them were only of me. But I was in every single one of them – off to the side, in the back of a group, at the bottom of the frame. Some of the pictures had only the tiniest part of my face captured at the very edge of the photo, but nevertheless, I was there. I was always there.
This realization crystallizes the theme: obsession thrives in the margins, turning the overlooked into evidence of an unending gaze. The photos’ distance encodes the stalker’s strategy—ownership without contact, control without confrontation—while the refrain “I was always there” reverses subject and object, making the Narrator the one who is always there for the stalker. What the images preserve is not memory but custody.