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.
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Joyce Carol Oates, an award-winning author of fiction, nonfiction, short stories, plays, and novellas, is the author of some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including two New York Times bestsellers. Her books have won the National Book Award, O. Henry Award, the Jerusalem Prize, and the National Humanities Medal, among others. Her work has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize several times. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
Christine Williams is a singer and actor based in Ashland, Oregon. Her performance credits include productions at regional theaters and on concert stages across the country and around the world, from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Barbican Centre in London to the Aspen Music Festival and the Grotowski Institute in Poland.