Daddy Love, Joyce Carol Oates
Daddy Love, Joyce Carol Oates
2 Rating(s)
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Daddy Love

Author: Joyce Carol Oates

Narrator: Christine Williams

Unabridged: 6 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/29/2013


Synopsis

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.

About Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of such national bestsellers as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys. Her other titles 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 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection; and Jack of Spades. She is the recipient of the National Book Award for Them and the 2010 President's National Humanities Medal.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Mark on March 23, 2022

How to describe Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates? JCO has this remarkable ability to take the reader to the precipice, she then takes pleasure watching us wobble and teeter, and with a wicked smirk she nudges us over the edge with her little finger. Just like that. See, with this book (and her other u......more

Goodreads review by Fabian on November 24, 2020

Like Zombie, this one is pretty horrific--about an abduction & a sick individual (o so very Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) named Daddy Love. (No, this was not as I had previously thought, a hardcore gay porn novel, alas.) The prose always borders on sublime... with the atrocious goings-on const......more

Goodreads review by Lori on March 03, 2013

And the plot sickens. JCO is the master of taking a loathsome topic and eviscerating it. You know when you pick up one of her books that it is going to rock you to your core. But this one, I don't know how to rate it. On the one hand, it's a creepy subject, child abduction. She drives her theme home;......more

Goodreads review by Lisa on February 06, 2013

I thought sleeping on it, holding off writing my thoughts would help them gel and, to some extent, it did. It was too stunning reading the last page to plunge immediately into my impressions, too soon to digest what had just happened. I knew, from reading other novels in Oates's oeuvre she'd leave m......more