Another Joyce Carol Oates Novel

If you want to be sick to your stomach, read Daddy Love, Oates' latest or perhaps penultimate novel. I think she dashed this one off while researching The Accursed.

Daddy Love is about a serial child kidnapper/murderer and his newest victim, snatched from his mother's hand in a mall parking lot. Daddy Love hits her with a brick and then runs her over with his van. The 5-year old suffers every abuse you could ever imagine and then some. Oates doesn't mention the Stockholm Syndrome, but that's what happens to these children. They end up loving their captor.

Eventually, Daddy Love tires of his victims because they enter puberty. He likes them young. When they reach a certain age, he kills and buries them.

For a change of pace, I'm reading James Wood's The Book Against God. It's very funny and quasi-intellectual, just like me.