<DIV>?After all these years, Joyce Carol Oates can still give me the creeps. Oates is a mind-reader who writes psychological horror stories about seriously disturbed minds, and it’s hard to tear your eyes away from her grimly detailed portrait of Daddy Love. But her insights into nice, ordinary people ? the kind of people Robbie’s parents used to be, before their son was stolen ? are no less incisive. Oates has more knives to throw before bringing this harrowing tale to a close ? but she saves the sharpest one for the very last page.” ?Marilyn Stasio, <I>New York Times Book Review</I><BR><BR>?Good fiction writers are master manipulators, too, and Joyce Carol Oates is very, very good?an effectively haunting nightmare.” ?<I>Boston Globe</I><BR><BR>"Throughout her long, unparalleled career ? a career eminently worthy of a Nobel Prize ? Oates has been a most insistent and consistent teacher. She illuminates the darkest corners and shows us the startled, troubled creatures hiding there, nursing their wounds, staring back at us, their kin." —<I>Cleveland Plain Dealer</I><BR><BR>Dinah Whitcomb seemingly has everything. A loving and successful husband, and a smart, precocious young son named Robbie. One day, their worlds are shattered when Dinah is attacked and Robbie is taken in a mall parking lot. Dinah, injured, attempts to follow, but is run over by the kidnapper's van, mangling her body nearly beyond repair.<BR><BR>The kidnapper, a part-time Preacher named Chester Cash, calls himself Daddy Love, as he has abducted, tortured, and raped several young boys into being his lover and as well as his "son." He confines Robbie in a device called an Wooden Maiden, in essence a small coffin, and renamed him "Gideon." Daddy Love slowly brainwashes "Gideon" into believing that he is Daddy Love's real son, and any time the boy resists or rebels it is met with punishment beyond his wildest nightmares.<BR><BR>As Dinah recovers from her wounds, her world and her marriage struggle to exist every day. Though it seems hopeless, she keeps a flicker of hope alive that her son is still alive.<BR><BR>As Robbie grows older, he becomes more aware of just how monstrous Daddy Love truly is. Though as a small boy he as terrified of what might happen if he disobeyed Daddy Love, Robbie begins to realize that the longer he stays in the home of this demon, the greater chance 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.</div>