The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Father of Lies by Brian Evenson
Eamonn Wall

Brian Evenson. Father of Lies. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998. 197 pp. $22.00.

Brian Evenson’s first novel is a harrowing, brutal, and cautionary exploration of pedophilia and murder. Eldon Fochs is a thirty-eight-year-old accountant and a lay provost for a conservative religious sect, the Corporation of the Blood of the Lamb, also referred to as “The Bloodites,” who in the course of the novel rapes children and murders both a teenage girl and his wife.
Another important focus in the novel is denial. Not only does Fochs seek to deny the horror of his crimes by casting them in a theological light by claiming that he is actually saving his victims by abusing and killing them, but also the church authorities, aware of the magnitude of his crimes, seek to silence the victims of Fochs’s abuse as they fear negative publicity. The mothers of the abused boys protest and are excommunicated and, at the novel’s end, Fochs is transferred to Church College, where he becomes a teacher. It is also clear that the powerful church authorities have been able to stymie the police in their investigations of Fochs’s crimes. Father of Lies is a compelling novel. Evenson writes with a powerful moral vision which is deftly welded to the novel’s finely wrought structure and which he never allows to overwhelm the narrative. Seamlessly, we progress from the outside world into Fochs’s deluded mind. Father of Lies is reminiscent of such modern classics as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon in how it explores an evil system whose real objective is not the betterment of its members but its own continuance and Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy in how it enters the world of the twisted human mind. Evenson writes with great formal dexterity and in Father of Lies he has produced a profound work of fiction. [Eamonn Wall]