New York Journal of Books | Review of DADDY LOVE by Joyce Carol Oates

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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.

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The Editors
Eckleburg was founded in 2010 as an online and print literary and arts journal. We take our title from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and include the full archives of our predecessor Moon Milk Review. Our aesthetic is eclectic, literary mainstream to experimental. We appreciate fusion forms including magical realist, surrealist, meta- realist and realist works with an offbeat spin. We value character-focused storytelling and language and welcome both edge and mainstream with punch aesthetics. We like humor that explores the gritty realities of world and human experiences. Our issues include original content from both emerging and established writers, poets, artists and comedians such as authors, Roxane Gay, Rick Moody, Cris Mazza, Steve Almond, Stephen Dixon, poets, Moira Egan and David Wagoner and actor/comedian, Zach Galifianakis.