D. Foy’s second novel is a tornado of brutal Americana. Patricide is a heavy metal Huck Finn that whips up the haunted melancholy of Kerouac’s Doctor Sax, a novel of introspection and youth in its corruption that seethes with the deadly obsession of Moby-Dick, and the darkness of Joy Williams’ State of Grace. Beyond the story of a boy growing up in a family derailed by a hapless father, Patricide is a search for meaning and identity within the strange secrecy of the family. This is an existential novel of wild power, of memories, and of mourning-in-life, softened, always, by the tenderness at its core. With it, Foy’s place among the outstanding voices in American literature is guaranteed.
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In D. Foy’s Patricide, the prose is so sharp and evocative that I feel as if I’m watching camcordered home movies that I both treasure and fear. It is as if Denis Johnson wrote Jesus’ Son with an anvil. There is blood and violence and there is heartbreak and heat and there is life and death on these pages. This book is a conjuring even as it is a killing. —Lindsay Hunter
Fantastic. —Dennis Cooper
Those of us who’ve been following D. Foy’s writing for a while will be gratified to find, in Patricide, another marvel of emotional intelligence, another heady cocktail of high linguistic invention and vernacular speech. Foy’s writing contains such energy, such sheer firepower, it’s tempting to cast him as a word merchant in the Stanley Elkin vein, a superlative technician working in the dark American shadow of Melville, etc. Only—such a description would omit Foy’s greatest virtue, namely, his wisdom. It’s one thing to describe the bleaker corners of experience with such full-throated vitality, and yet quite another to do so with as much empathy and equipoise. I already knew Foy was a genius. Now I’m beginning to think he’s a saint. —Matthew Specktor
Patricide is a torrent: bruising, beautiful, impossible to shake. D. Foy writes with an intelligence and a ferocity that is exquisitely his own. —Laura van den Berg
I want to be seared by what I read. Marked. Branded. Every book I open, I want to be changed by what I find inside. Too often that doesn’t happen. With Patricide it did, glory be. If you’re looking for a novel that makes you feel good, don’t pick this one up. But if you want to be marked—if you want an education about life and all its brutality and tenderness—this is the book for you. —Ron Currie
The fraught relationship between fathers and sons has been poured over by the likes of Rick Moody, Ivan Turgenev, Steven King, Pat Conroy, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy. What D. Foy does in Patricide is blast fully into the ranks of the masters. A frightening, touching, challenging, and emotionally charged masterpiece. —Christian Kiefer
Patricide is a novel of abuse, addiction, and conflicted love in which D. Foy bends language around the patriarchal until it screams. It’s a knockout of a book. Read it now. —Terese Svoboda
Biting as Beckett and honey-hued as a Tom Waits ramshackle ballad, D. Foy’s Patricide is a spiraling and spiteful spire of memory’s two great gods, nostalgia and blame. With it, Foy has delivered a true work of art—addictive, hypnotic, relentless. —Scott Cheshire
I’m a fan of Foy, not just for the crazy tales he cooks up, but for his formidable use of language. He writes sentences that are both beautiful and volatile at the same time. Patricide, like a lovely concussion, will leave you dizzy and desperate for the next page. —Joshua Mohr
D. Foy’s sentences are a storm, and his second novel thunders its own beautiful, brutal weather. Patricide is a gale-force to be reckoned with. —Anne Valente
The literary superstorm that is Patricide reads as though it had been brewing for decades before D. Foy, in a torrent of inspiration, was forced to blow. As Karl Ove Knausgaard explodes life’s quotidian moments with cool, clockwork precision, Foy expands phenomena ecstatic and traumatic to degrees that not only evoke lived experience but transport the reader to their very essence. When finally the novel achieves its full cyclonic shape, you’re caught in its horrid eye, confronted with the kind of diamond-cut awareness typically offered only to the broken, the abused, the fully-surrendered. The screaming inner child—help me, save me, love me—is torn to bits, giving rise to a quietude that demands nothing less than acceptance of things as they are. Foy’s been there, and lives there still, and this book offers up his battered jewel. —Sean Madigan Hoen
Warning: This book, Patricide, is not messing around. This book is going to take you with it. Do not fight this book, it will win. This book will bite, but you will like it. This book will hurt, but in the best of ways. Do not be afraid of this book. Be thankful D. Foy has made it for us. —Elizabeth Crane
Hurricane Father rips through the pages of Patricide. We stand there stunned, surveying the wreckage, only to realize that this is just the eye: another wall of storm is coming—Hurricane Mother, Hurricane Addiction, Hurricane Marriage. D. Foy animates and maps these weather systems of life, but he’s less a meteorologist in a studio than a storm chaser with his head out the window of a van, screaming brilliance dead into the wind. —Will Chancellor
Patricide is a brooding, painful, and beautifully written book about being raised into damage by a damaged man. D. Foy has given us a how-to guide for the excision of the father and—just barely—the survival of it. —Brian Evenson
If Patricide is a book in which love and survival are at constant odds, D. Foy is the only one who can broker a truce. Baleful and beautiful, Foy’s words braid a destructive tapestry that gets at the heart of what it means to grow up in a world that won’t have you. It’s also a story of resilience and resistance on a razor’s edge. Once you start reading, you won’t be able to stop, no matter how much it hurts. —Samuel Sattin
