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Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates

Trigger Warnings: kidnapping, CSA, child abuse, misogyny

I am halfway through the book and I am enjoying it so far, Daddy Love starts with Robbie's mom, Dinah's, POV. She is walking through the parking lot of a mall with Robbie after a shopping trip. Tension starts to build as Robbie becomes more and more distressed as he can't remember where the car is, his distress causes Dinah to stress and question her worth as a mother. This builds up to every parent's worst nightmare: Robbie is literally snatched from her hand by a stranger who proceeds to run her down with his car.

The first few chapters were a bit repetitive and confusing, I had to check a few times to make sure I didn't somehow go back to the first chapter, I believe Oates did this in a way to emulate how we tend to replay events over and over in our heads, trying to find some way we could have prevented a tragedy, in this case Dinah losing her son. It is quite effective as it puts you in Dinah's shoes, both in her confusion leading up to the kidnapping and after, when she's trying to communicate with police.

After the kidnapping we meet Chet Cash, or Daddy Love. We learn he has a history of kidnapping young boys under the age of 10, and killing them when they reach puberty as they are no longer "appealling" to him. Chet is a pedophile, he kidnaps Robbie when he is young, and it is implied he rapes and sexually abuses Robbie, both as punishment and for his own pleasure. I really appreciate that Oates never goes into detail when Chet is sexually abusing Robbie. As someone who has read a lot of splatterpunk and extreme horror, detailed sexual abuse scenes feel like a crutch to make the audience disturbed, especially when the abuse is against children. An implication or less explicit description goes a long way to letting the audience fill in the blanks. There is also a discussion to be had about the ethics of portraying CSA in media, especially when it comes to disturbing books where it is a key element. While I don't believe that people should go to jail for writing this kind of content, there is a fine line between trying to describe something horrific and writing something that's exploitative. I always appreciate authors who know where to draw the line and respect the reader to know that something is horrific without having to go into gross detail, and Oates is one of those authors.

Overall I am enjoying Daddy Love, I've reached a timeskip to 6 years later, where Robbie (now known as Gideon) is in grade 6 and attending school. I look forward to seeing where the book goes