‘Reply’ goes for the cheap thrill

Dan Chaon’s second novel, “Await Your Reply,’’ is just such a leprechaun. Straining for the pace of a supermarket paperback, it’s a long way down from his first, “You Remind Me of Me.’’ That book was the opposite of plotty; it relied on flashbacks, the quiet backdrop of a slow-moving middle America, small yet charged events. In a weak mirroring, “Await Your Reply’’ hooks you with an opening scene of terrible violence much like the previous novel did. But while in the 2004 work the violence was shocking because it was so ordinary, here it is so over the top it becomes banal: a mysterious villain chopping off someone’s hand. This is the kind of pulp that sets the tone.

From there we proceed to the disparate threads that, also as in his previous novel, turn out to be intimately interwound. There’s an orphan who falls in love with her high school history teacher and elopes; a 30-year-old loser in perpetual search of his disappeared schizophrenic twin brother; and a college freshman who drops off the grid when he finds out his uncle is really his dad and his so-called parents have been lying to him his whole life. Three vanishings, which find themselves in a plot as overawed by its own subject matter - identity theft - as the 1995 movie “The Net’’ was with the scarily new World Wide Web. The disappeared twin turns out to be a hacker mastermind who’s lived dozens of different lives across the nation, bilked millions from the system, and seduced at least a couple of unwitting young women. Here’s some sample dialogue: “You better get your ass online and start checking your people. I think we might be under attack.’’