The Auctioneer

Something I absolutely loved about this book is the way that there's a tense uneasiness in the air that never goes away. In fact, it gets worse as the stakes get raised higher and higher.

The eponymous auctioneer is a cult of personality. He's nice. He's charming. Everybody loves him. So, what's the catch? Well...the catch is everything one could expect about this sort of character.

The first half of this book flies by, but the second half kind of drags in spots. The ending is also a bit unsatisfying, but it was a hell of a ride nonetheless.

This book doesn’t contain gore, there’s no animalistic monster, and for the most part, there isn’t much violence, but man does it scare me. The horror of this is creeping and is a notable example of show don’t tell. It's all the little things that build up that makes this so good. How could you force an entire town to give up their possessions? I now know and believe it could happen the way it did in the book.

As I read through this, I kept thinking come on fight back. This goes on for most of the book amplifying the feeling of helplessness the characters feel. It got to the point I wanted to put the book down, but the story was so good that I couldn’t. Which was a good thing, as after finishing the book I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I wish there could have been more books by this author. It’s such a good book I went out and bought it afterward.

Color me sadly underwhelmed. After reading all the excitement regarding this book, I was disappointed. It didn't remind me of NH very much, and I'm from there. The entire time I read, I was thinking of any accent but the obnoxious one of my childhood. There are some farms there, sure, but it isn't actually necessarily the easiest state in which to farm, unless you're mostly a cattle farmer. The classic ‘Ayuh,' only happens once. It was small-town ambiguous.

I don't mind the strangeness, but there should have been more. This read more as a domestic thriller with absurdist overtones or something. Not horror. And all the men are terrible. The only one I liked was the drunk, Mickey.

It wasn't bad. But it was not what I was hoping. Nor was it at all scary or chilling. After everything, the ending was strangely abrupt and dramatic. But I'm glad I read it, since it's important.

The Auctioneer is having a bit of a renaissance at the moment. Much lauded at the time of its release, the untimely death of its author left it being forgotten before a string of recent rereleases have brought it back into the discussion. This is a classic take on the city versus countryside. Set in small town rural America, it plays on the sense of community that is present in those type of places and the ease there is for it to be abused.

In this story we follow a family living on the edge of a farming community. When a slick city person moves to town and asks for donations for an auction to raise money for improving the police force, they donate generously. This community spirit becomes the mechanism of self destruction in the end as the levers of power are gradually coopted by the newcomers and the community ripped apart.

This is a slow burner of a novel. It focuses very much on the horror that humans can do to one another, how easy it is for institutions to be corrupted. Clever in its own way, it unfortunately did not really hit the spot for me. I can respect what it does, but it was just a bit too slow for me.

It's not a bad book, but I probably would've liked it better as a short story because parts of it feel a little tedious and padded out. Still, I liked the characters and the overall story. A solid read.

I'm not sure what to say, I was unprepared for this novel. It has come up a lot lately as it has been reissued and it has a cult following and I totally understand why. This was so tense! And it's so easy to be outside of it thinking, oh, I would do this or I would do that but, in the end, you are just as trapped as the main characters. It's a slow burn of terror. I think I would have be satisfied with a more violent ending but the one we got was pretty damned creepy.
The novel raises so many questions, specifically about outside forces and how stable our lives really are.
I have a feeling I, like many readers, will be thinking about this novel for decades to come.

Aptly compared to Shirley Jackson and Sherwood Anderson, this bit of New England horror kept me up at night until I finally was so wound with anxiety I had to put the book down, put on a relaxing podcast, and stare at my ceiling. Motifs of fragile masculinity and capitalism dealt with in ways that still resonate today.