Review: Daddy Love

by Joyce Carol Oates (Mysterious Press)

New focus on the sexual molestation of children in the family has resulted in a more enlightened attitude and tougher laws. But they are no shield against our worst nightmare – the stranger who abducts a child for sexual abuse.

The serial paedophile has taken over from the serial killer as one of crime fiction’s most dreaded characters.

Acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates is not one to flinch from a frightful subject. Her previous book, A Fair Maiden, mined the disturbing relationship between a 15-year-old girl and an older, wealthy man – and it impressed me as a work of fiction, and worried me.

Daddy Love worries me even more. I am bound to warn that it will probably provoke a similar reaction in you.

A loving mother stops for a moment in a parking garage to light a cigarette. In that moment, she is hit over the head and her little son is thrust into a van, which is then deliberately driven over her, leaving her with terrible injuries. The exterior wounds are nothing compared to the appalling moment her son is taken, a scene that is frozen in her mind and which she replays over and over.

Years pass. The five-year-old boy has been taken by an experienced paedophile whose previously snatched boys have been murdered as they reach adolescence. This latest child and his “Daddy Love” live in a cabin in a rural environment where everyone keeps to themselves, assuming that the cowering “Robbie” is a rather backward boy.

Daddy Love knows how to groom and train children. He uses fear and “love”, emotional and physical, to break down the child’s resistance so that a symbiotic relationship develops, in which the child can even be trusted, as he grows, to attend school and venture off on his own. Even when Robbie tries to flee, his need for “fatherly” contact and affirmation draws him crawling back.

We seldom really understand the proverbial caution, “Beware of what you wish for, for you may get it”. When Robbie is found, his mother cannot believe her luck, despite his obvious injuries and trauma. But we know little of what such a destructive childhood can mean for a stolen, raped boy, or how it will affect his search for affection in the future.

As always, Oates handles this terrible tale with a precise, steely hand, without hyperbole. She unfolds the monstrous story in sparing prose; its content spares nothing.

I thought Daddy Love was, as the books of Oates are, extraordinary.

But I think this recommendation needs to come with a caution. It may well turn out to be too harrowing for sensitive readers. – Beverley Roos-Muller