Daddy Love

by Joyce Carol Oates Narrated by Christine Williams

Overview

Dinah Whitcomb seemingly has everything-a loving and successful husband, and a smart, precocious young son named Robbie-until one day, their worlds are shattered when Dinah is attacked and Robbie is abducted from a mall parking lot. As Dinah recovers from her wounds, she struggles to come to terms with her new reality and to keep her marriage afloat. Though it seems hopeless, she retains a flicker of hope that her son is still alive.
 
The kidnapper, a part-time preacher named Chester Cash, calls himself Daddy Love: he has abducted, tortured, and raped several young boys, indoctrinating them into becoming both his lover and his “son.” He renames Robbie “Gideon,” slowly brainwashing him into believing that he is Daddy Love's real son. Any time the boy resists or rebels, he faces punishment beyond his wildest nightmares.
 
As Robbie grows older, he begins to realize that the longer he stays in the home of this demon, the greater the chance that 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 soon he sees just what lengths he must go to in order to have any chance at survival.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Marilyn Stasio

After all these years, Joyce Carol Oates can still give me the creeps…Oates is a mind-reader who writes psychological horror stories about seriously disturbed minds, and it's hard to tear your eyes away from her grimly detailed portrait of Daddy Love. But her insights into nice, ordinary people—the kind of people Robbie's parents used to be, before their son was stolen—are no less incisive.

Publishers Weekly - Audio

Oates’s disturbing tale is chillingly conveyed in this audio edition thanks to Christine Williams’s compelling narration. The story begins in 2007 with the kidnapping of five-year-old Robbie Whitcomb from a Michigan mall parking lot. During the abduction, the kidnapper runs down Robbie’s mother, Dinah, leaving her near death and horribly wounded. The book then chronicles the next six years in the lives of Robbie—renamed Gideon by his kidnapper—and his parents, who struggle to come to terms with the loss of their only child and Dinah’s traumatic injuries. Williams provides a calm, almost clinical reading that captures listener attention immediately. And when the plot of the book turns violent, the events become all the more unsettling via Williams’s matter-of-fact delivery. Listeners willing to delve into dark material will find themselves in good hands. A Mysterious Press hardcover. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

At the start of this gripping psychological thriller from Oates (The Gravedigger’s Daughter), Dinah Whitcomb is playing the “find our car” game with her five-year-old son, Robbie, in the parking lot of an Ypsilanti, Mich., mall when a stranger seizes the boy and runs over Dinah in his van, maiming her. Robbie is renamed Gideon by Daddy Love, his abductor, who has kidnapped several little boys through the years, killing them when they’re adolescents and “too old” for him. The outside world knows Daddy Love as Chet Cash, a loving father, a sensitive artist, and itinerant preacher. Spanning six years, the action shifts between Gideon and Daddy Love, who’s quick to mete out cruel punishments, and Dinah and her husband, bonded by guilt in a crumbling marriage. The creep factor ramps up when the intuitive Gideon realizes that he’s not Daddy Love’s only “son” and the fate that awaits him. This unsettling tale showcases Oates’s masterful storytelling. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Associates. (Jan.)

From the Publisher

Praise for Daddy Love:

“After all these years, Joyce Carol Oates can still give me the creeps. Oates is a mind-reader who writes psychological horror stories about seriously disturbed minds, and it’s hard to tear your eyes away from her grimly detailed portrait of Daddy Love. But her insights into nice, ordinary people—the kind of people Robbie’s parents used to be, before their son was stolen—are no less incisive. 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.” —Marilyn Stasio, New York Times Book Review

"Wrenching, tightly written and focused . . . a grim examination of how humans cope with unspeakable physical and psychological pain. She illuminates the darkest corners and shows us the startled, troubled creatures hiding there, nursing their wounds, staring back at us, their kin." —Cleveland Plain-Dealer

"I haven't met a Joyce Carol Oates story or novel that I didn't like and Daddy Love is no exception." —Huntington News

"Haunting, terrifying, disturbing.” —Atlantic Wire

“Joyce Carol Oates, author of dozens of grim novels, knows the dark side of life better than most and explores it here in a lean and disturbing tale that reverberates after its ending.” —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

“An urgently compelling and drastically revealing study of evil, habitual terror, and survival.” —Booklist

"Daddy Love is a book not to be taken lightly . . . [it] pushes us to confront what lurks behind the front door." —New York Journal of Books

"Joyce Carol Oates’s latest book is a horror. As in horror story, frightening, alarmingly realistic. The monsters in Daddy Love are people, not fantastical creatures from the deep or outer space. They are human." —PopMatters

New York Times

Oates’s disturbing tale is chillingly conveyed in this audio edition thanks to Christine Williams’s compelling narration.”
—Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

Oates raises a troubling question here--whether moral fiction can emerge out of a morally reprehensible character. Chester Cash, aka Daddy Love, is an itinerant preacher with a penchant for abducting and torturing young boys, and the novel begins with one such abduction. Five-year-old Robbie Whitcomb is doted on by his mother, Dinah, but one day, in the parking lot of a shopping mall, she neglects her son just long enough to have him spirited away by Daddy Love. In trying to prevent this horrifying act from occurring, Dinah is run over by Love's van and never physically recovers. Love makes off with Robbie and eventually moves him from Michigan to New Jersey, where they live in virtual seclusion. Love gives out that he's a widower who doesn't want to talk about his late wife--a statement which is, by the way, true--and a suspicion lingers in our minds that he might well have murdered his wife, a well-to-do woman about 40 years older than Love. Through confinement and humiliation, Robbie is trained to see the preacher as his "real" father, although Love, like his ironic name, is obviously a grotesque perversion of paternal solicitude. He deprives Robbie of food, confines him in a "truth box" and sexually abuses him. After six years, Robbie is able to escape and reunite with his parents. Dinah is jubilant about this reunion, though Whit, Dinah's husband, is somewhat less so, in part because his status as the father of a missing child made him a quasi-celebrity. But Robbie, of course, is not the same child at 11 that he was at 5, and their family reconnection is, to put it charitably, uneasy. This is an uncomfortable novel to read; Oates makes us squirm as she forces us to see some of the action through Love's twisted and warped perspective.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171676889
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	01/29/2013
Edition description:	Unabridged

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