Daddy Love

"It's hard to tear your eyes away from her grimly detailed portrait of Daddy Love . . . Oates has more knives to throw before bringing this harrowing tale to a close--but she saves the sharpest one for the very last page." --The New York Times Book Review

Dinah Whitcomb seemingly has everything. A loving and successful husband, and a smart, precocious young son named Robbie. One day, their worlds are shattered when Dinah is attacked and Robbie is taken in a mall parking lot. Dinah, injured, attempts to follow, but is run over by the kidnapper's van, mangling her body nearly beyond repair.

The kidnapper, a part-time Preacher named Chester Cash, calls himself Daddy Love, as he has abducted, tortured, and raped several young boys. He renames Robbie "Gideon." Daddy Love slowly brainwashes "Gideon" into believing that he is Daddy Love's real son, and any time the boy resists or rebels it is met with punishment beyond his wildest nightmares.

As Robbie grows older, he becomes aware of just how monstrous Daddy Love is. Though as a small boy he as terrified of what might happen if he disobeyed Daddy Daddy Love, Robbie begins to realize that the longer he stays in the home of this demon, the greater chance he'll end up like Daddy Love's other "sons" who were never heard from again. Somewhere within this tortured young boy lies a spark of rebellion, and he will soon discover just what lengths he'll go to to survive.

Joyce Carol Oates is peerless when writing about the terrors that lurk right next door, and in Daddy Love she delivers a terrifying novel about every parent's worst nightmare come to life.


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.