Daddy Love

October 22, 2012
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.

March 25, 2013
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.