Daddy Love - Hardcover

Oates, Joyce Carol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802120997 ISBN 13: 9780802120991

Publisher: Mysterious Press, 2013

Synopsis

From the author of Bellefleur: A "psychologically incisive" glimpse into the mind of a deranged predator and the boy he abducts to be his son (Booklist).

Robbie Whitcomb is five years old when he's taken from his mother in a mall parking lot. In her attempt to chase the kidnapper, she's left badly injured and permanently disfigured. Such are the methods of the man who calls himself Daddy Love—a man known to the rest of the world as charismatic preacher Chester Cash.

For the next six years, Robbie is to be Daddy's son. That means doing whatever Daddy says—and giving him whatever he wants. Soon Robbie learns to accept his new name, Gideon. He also learns that he is not the first of Daddy Love's sons. And that each of the others, after reaching a certain age, was never seen again.

As Robbie's mother recovers from her wounds, her life and marriage are a daily struggle. But as years go by, she maintains a flicker of hope that her son is still alive. Meanwhile, Robbie approaches the "bittersweet age" with no illusions about his fate. But somewhere within this tortured child lies a spark of rebellion. And he knows all too well what survival requires.

"After all these years, Joyce Carol Oates can still give me the creeps." —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

"A lean and disturbing tale that reverberates after its ending." —The Columbus Dispatch

"Oates makes us squirm as she forces us to see some of the action through Love's twisted and warped perspective." —Kirkus Reviews

"This unsettling tale showcases Oates's masterful storytelling." —Publishers Weekly

About this title

About the Author

JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author of such national bestsellers as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys. Her other titles for The Mysterious Press include Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense, which features “The Woman in the Window,” selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2017; The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, which won the 2016 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection; The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares, which won the 2011 Bram Stoker Award for Short Horror Fiction; and Jack of Spades. She is the recipient of the National Book Award for them and the 2010 President’s National Humanities Medal.

Reviews

Oates’ daring journey through the labyrinths of criminal minds takes a fierce turn in this unflinching yet restrained tale of the sick symbiosis between an abducted child and his fiendish captor. Dinah, a white woman living in Michigan, defied her nasty mother to marry Whit, a black radio personality. They love and adore their son, Robbie, who is a smart if high-strung five-year-old when a stranger ambushes Dinah in a mall parking lot, grabs her son, and nearly kills her when she desperately runs after his van. Known as Chester Cash, a secretive itinerant preacher and craftsman, this monster calls himself Daddy Love as he conducts his gruesome regime of torture, rape, and reward, which we witness from both his and Robbie’s perspectives over the course of six grim years. For all the horror and sensationalism of her wrenching subject, Oates judiciously charts Robbie’s brutal metamorphosis and Dinah’s resilience in an urgently compelling and drastically revealing study of evil, habitual terror, and survival. HIGH-DEMAND BACK STORY: Expect heated interest from Oates devotees and all readers drawn to strongly wrought, psychologically incisive dark tales. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Mysterious Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802120997
• ISBN 13: 9780802120991
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240