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Sebastian Ritscher
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CRY FATHER

Benjamin Whitmer

In the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and Larry Brown comes a haunting story about men, their fathers, their sons, and the legacy of violence.
For Patterson Wells, disaster is the norm. Working alongside dangerous, desperate, itinerant men as a tree clearer in disaster zones, he’s still dealing with the loss of his young son. Writing letters to the boy offers some solace. The bottle gives more.

Upon a return trip to Colorado, Patterson stops to go fishing with an old acquaintance, only to find him in a meth-induced delirium and keeping a woman tied up in the bathtub. In the ensuing chain of events, which will test not only his future but his past, Patterson tries to do the right thing. Still, in the lives of those he knows, violence and justice have made of each other strange, intoxicating bedfellows.

Hailed as “the next great American writer” (Frank Bill, author of Crimes in Southern Indiana), Benjamin Whitmer has crafted a literary triumph that is by turns harrowing, darkly comic, and wise.

Benjamin Whitmer is the author of Pike, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Grand Prix de Littérature Policier, and coauthor (with Charlie Louvin) of Satan is Real, a New York Times’ Critics’ Choice book.

Whitmer was born and raised on back-to-the-land communes and counterculture enclaves ranging from Southern Ohio to Upstate New York. One of his earliest and happiest memories is of standing by the side of a country road with his mother, hitchhiking to parts unknown. Since then, he's been a factory grunt, a vacuum salesman, a convalescent, a high-school dropout, a graduate student, a semi-truck loader, an activist, a kitchen-table gunsmith, a squatter, a college professor, a dish washer, a technical writer, and a petty thief.
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Published 2014-09-01 by Gallery

Book

Published 2014-09-01 by Gallery

Comments

Benjamin writes about the rustbelt of life. Showing the seedy, the dark, and the things that others are afraid show us, what goes on in the blue collar minds of men and women, fathers and sons. Their struggles and failures. And the blood they're willing to spill for the lives they chosen. Benjamin Whitmer is making his claim as the next great American writer.

Whitmer’s bleak tale of dysfunctional father-son relationships contains some shockingly violent scenes, captures the seedy milieus of rundown mountain towns, and tallies the enormous cost of loving and losing

Benjamin Whitmer's second novel is a first-rate addition to the canon of "rural noir" storytelling. Read more...

Cry Father is strong medicine. It burns going down, but there's healing in that dose as well. It's a book that put me in the mind of my own Dad and made me think of my own duties as a father. And any book that can reach inside your heart and mind and force you to reflect on such things is doing something very, very right indeed.

Whitmer (Pike, 2010, etc.) offers dark literary fiction delving into incalculable loss mirrored by the vagaries of father-son relationships. Read more...

With each wild turn of events, this novel continues to intrigue. Read more...

[CRY FATHER] is absolutely uncompromising and one of 2014's must read novels. Read more...

Opening CRY FATHER and reading it is like grabbing hold of a low voltage wire of electric current. You think you can handle it --- and you can, for a minute or two. By the time you realize that it’s beyond you, it’s too late. The current is surging through your body, and you are, as they say, committed. There is no letting go. Read more...

The writing combines the best elements of noir with emotional grittiness and a degree of physical violence that wouldn't be out of place in a horror book, but the author brings them together with such unpretentious elegance that the end result can only be described as beautiful. Read more...

Since the death of Larry Brown there have been at least a dozen novelists touted as the heir to Brown’s gritty throne. Needless to say, there have been few who’ve actually lived up to the promise. However, Benjamin Whitmer’s stark debut [Pike] easily rivals Brown’s most renowned novels.