Brother Cobweb

All Calvin Elkan has ever wanted to do is escape his mother and her Pentecostal church, the Lighthouse. Calvin is eternally at odds with the brutal abuses and ignorance of his upbringing in a right-wing evangelical sect in Ohio. Under the guidance of his great-grandfather, he turns to art and music to escape his mother’s blows and the grip of the Lighthouse. He spins the dark world around him into a satirical comic called The Brother Cobweb Chronicles. After high school, Calvin moves out and enrolls in art school, finally free of his oppressive childhood home.But after a brush with death, Calvin realizes escape isn’t enough.Through his artwork and a newfound sense of spirituality, Calvin works through the emotional trauma and distances himself from his past only to uncover yet another ugly secret from the Lighthouse—a secret that makes him question everything.Brother Cobweb is a coming-of-age saga with a misfit, paradoxical artist at its center. Alfred Eaker’s debut novel seeks to change perspectives through innovative language, dark humor, and marginalized subculture. A surreal and provocative odyssey, it is sure to strike a nerve as it exposes the abuses and hypocrisy of an all-too-familiar Midwestern evangelical church.

Alfred Eaker has been obsessively working on his first novel, Brother Cobweb, for the last five years and, off and on, for a quarter of a century. Additionally, his first eighteen years were spent in a ho-de-ho, backwoods, sawdust on the floor, wooden pews Pentecostal Church in the Midwest. In other words, Eaker's been working toward this novel his whole damned life. In his career as an artist, Eaker's work has been paradoxically labeled as degenerate, orthodox, heterodox, modernist, mystical theology, provocative, academic, and blasphemous. Indeed, blasphemy is a language that Eaker seems to speak fluently, even when he doesn't mean to, and he's been doing it through painting, performance art, independent film, and film criticism for three decades. Oh, and he has a few degrees in theology and art.