The Auctioneer

“A well-made piece of dynamite... For all their talk, the author seems to be saying men will permit their souls to be carried away bit by bit and auctioned off to the highest bidder. Samson has written a suspenseful, engrossing novel with the most gripping and violent ending we’ve encountered in some time.” — Newsday

“Really one of those books that once started you won’t be able to put it down. You’ll tell yourself that it couldn’t happen here, but Joan Samson is such a skillful and convincing writer that it will hold you as spellbound as are the novel’s characters themselves.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Harrowing tensions explode in a series of events that could happen anywhere, to anyone, just as they do to John Moore — whose days of freedom run out, who is stripped of his possessions, his courage, and his hopes, by the ominous presence of an insidious stranger impossible to resist.

Published to wide acclaim in 1976, but almost neglected since then, The Auctioneer is a bona fide classic of American literature. The story of John Moore, his wife Mim, and his mother, it is a gripping tale of greed in a small town being quietly overrun by auctioneer Perly Dunsmore. Acclaimed by writers including Stephen King, and an influence on King’s Needful Things, The Auctioneer is here reprinted for the first time in thirty years.

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Synopsis for the 2020 edition by Suntup Editions:

One of the finest and bestselling horror novels of the 1970’s, Joan Samson’s The Auctioneer is a chilling masterpiece of terror. In an isolated New Hampshire farming community where little has changed over the past several decades, John Moore and his wife Mim do their best to maintain the family farm and live a modest, hardworking life. But from the moment the charismatic Perly Dinsmore arrives in town, soliciting donations for his auctions, the community of Harlowe slowly and insidiously starts to change. As the auctioneer carries out his terrible, inscrutable plan, the Moores and their neighbors will find themselves gradually but inexorably stripped of their freedom, their possessions, and perhaps even their lives.

Upon its release in 1975, The Auctioneer was received with wide acclaim. Newsday hailed it “a suspenseful, engrossing novel with the most gripping and violent ending we’ve encountered for some time.” The Grand Rapids Press lauded it, “a powerful novel by a powerful author.” The New York Times called it, “explosive and chilling... I challenge anyone to resist it after reading the first few pages.”

Despite critical praise, sales of over a million copies, a popular television advertisement, and efforts to turn the novel into a film, The Auctioneer went out of print soon after its release and was considered a lost gem of a novel for subsequent decades.

Written by a young, talented, and promising author, The Auctioneer would ultimately be Joan Samson’s only novel. Sadly, she passed away shortly after the book’s publication, edging the novel further into obscurity. The Auctioneer found its way back to print in 2018 in a trade edition, returning at last to chill a new generation of readers.

With echoes of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Stephen King’s Needful Things, Samson’s slow burn of understated violence builds to a climactic fever pitch with an ending that makes for one of the most unforgettable horror novels of all time.