Father of Lies

by Brian Evenson, Samuel R. Delany (Introduction)

Overview

"[Evenson's] scary fictional treatment of church hypocrisy has the feeling of a reasoned attack on blind religious obedience."—Publishers Weekly

Provost Eldon Fochs may be a sexual criminal. His therapist isn't sure, and his church is determined to protect its reputation. Father of Lies is Brian Evenson's fable of power, paranoia, and the dangers of blind obedience, and a terrifying vision of how far institutions will go to protect themselves against the innocents who may be their victims.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566894159
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	02/09/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	200
Sales rank:	94,396
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Brian Evenson: Praised by Peter Straub for going “furthest out on the sheerest, least sheltered narrative precipice,” Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction. He has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the World Fantasy Award and the winner of the International Horror Guild Award, the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel, and one of Time Out New York’s top books. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and three O. Henry Prizes, Evenson lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.

What People are Saying About This

Andrew Vachss

A remarkable book, with enormous potential to inflame.

Editorial Reviews

"Evenson's literary genius lay in his ability to spread reasonable doubt and blur lines of inquiry." —New York Journal of Books

From the Publisher

It's not easy to tell in this psychological chiller whether Provost Eldon Fochs is a recipient of the devil's attention or a criminal psychopath with delusions. In the end, it doesn't matter. Evenson's disturbing first novel addresses what he calls "a problem common in a wide range of religions." That is, a church leadership that exploits the ambiguity of religious phraseology and its own assumed purity to shield corruption. The highest authorities of the Church of the Blood of the Lamb are well aware that one of their provosts is committing sexual crimes against children. When psychotherapist Alexander Feshtig, whose clinical account of Fochs's "disturbances" open the book, attempts to bring the provost to justice, he discovers what it means to go up against a self-righteous organization. So do the mothers of the victimized children. Through alternating first-person chapters, Fochs emerges as a man with no remorse and a narcissistic thirst for demeaning others. Yet rather than being censured by his church, he's protected. He's even included on a committee sitting in judgment of him, because he's presumed innocent and therefore eligible. All the while, a strange man known to the reader only as Bloody Head makes all the right things happen for him in return for certain loathsome favors. Evenson's allegory of blind religious obedience is a shocking account of a predator expert in the "soul murder" of the vulnerable, a villain who relies on the church to abet his crimes. Given Evenson's well-publicized expulsion from the faculty of Brigham Young University (after the publication of his 1994 story collection, Altmann's Tongue), his scary fictional treatment of church hypocrisy has the feeling of a reasoned attack on blind religious obedience. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Storywriter Evenson (Altmann's Tongue, 1994) makes his novel debut with a timely, readable, but debilitatingly stiff exploration of hypocrisy and religious zeal. Imagine a conservative religious group—subscribing explicitly to 'family values,' of course—so rigorously zealous that it calls itself the Corporation of the Blood of the Lamb and even accepts the nickname of 'Bloodites.' And imagine there being in this group a dedicated, widely respected, unquestionably stolid and upright family man who serves as a 'provost,' or kind of priest, thus having great moral and spiritual responsibilities not only to his own wife and four children, but to all the families—and children—of the Bloodite congregation. And then imagine that this stolid, upright, trustworthy man is in reality nutty as a fruitcake, a raging psycho who half-deludes even himself into believing that he isn't actually a child-rapist and child-murderer who invariably gets away with his ugly crimes by drawing conveniently on own indelible appearance of sanctity and reputation for goodness—after all, his logic goes, he wouldn't be a provost if he weren't good, would he? Then imagine dreams beginning to disrupt the sleep of this man, Eldon Fochs, so violently that his wife insists he go for counseling. And imagine that his psychiatrist, bit by bit, begins to uncover the truth—only to find himself then being 'told' by authorities of the Corporation to cover it up and desist, since after all, the reputation of the church must be preserved. 'It's a dirty game they play,' thinks the psychiatrist, the most rounded and alluring figure in the book but one who, alas, disappears too soon, leaving us inthe company of the vile church superiors and the repugnant Fochs himself, who remains creaky and automaton-like even while being visited—as in, say, Dostoevsky—by vicious doubles representing his own mind. An investigation of the perverse that, however impassioned in aim or zealous in its own message, remains distractingly cartoon-like and thin.

Kirkus Reviews