“Daddy Love pushes us to confront what lurks behind the front door.”
Robbie Whitcomb falls prey to serial abductor, rapist, and killer named Daddy Love, a self-proclaimed traveling minister who nearly kills Robbie’s mother in the getaway, disfiguring her for life.
For six years, Robbie undergoes torture, sexual abuse, brainwashing, and conditioning until he accepts his abductor as family and turns to nefarious coping in result of his suffering. While his mother and father hope for his return Robbie forgets they exist.
In her familiar, unflinching style, Joyce Carol Oates’s Daddy Love pulls back the veil, delving into the wounds of a family ripped apart by a monster antagonist. Daddy Love is a near hopeless landscape and primer for how mental illness and criminal intention might grow within even the most innocent and promising. Read more at New York Journal of Books.
