Father is Pleased (and rather disturbed!) by L. Andrew Cooper.
Author: L. Andrew Cooper
Publication Date: July 15, 2025
Genres: Fiction
Representation: Gay/Bisexual
When a book comes your way with a caution about being extreme, about containing most of the major triggers, you know you’re going to be in for something bloody and messy and possibly even obscene. I’m not opposed to that – I do, after all, have my dark side – but when you add a queer label onto it, my interest is well-and-truly piqued.
Before I get into the extreme, let me talk a bit about the horror. Father is Pleased is a well-written story with some powerful language, (disgustingly) well-developed themes, and characters who are entirely abhorrent, yet somehow relatable. L. Andrew Cooper doesn’t just throw the reader into an apocalyptic death cult, and he doesn’t belabor the point about brainwashing or mass psychosis. Instead, he drops us into a cult, lets us experience it through the eyes of its members, invites us to understand how they came to believe in it, and leaves it to us to pass judgment and take meaning from it. There’s no omniscient narrator to lead the reader along and define mortality for us, just a young man who is fully committed to Father and their cult, and who isn’t about to apologize for the monstrous things he’s about to do.
That brings us to the extreme. This is a story with murder, masochism, abuse, arousal, delusions, and deviations. Without saying too much, there’s a whole subplot about motherhood, the value (and, more importantly, the cost) of fathering a boy, and a ritual that owes as much to the belief about eating the placenta as the flesh of God. There’s a brutal orgy that reaches the heights of mass hysteria and initiation battles that demand torturous creativity, but it’s the practice murder of an outsider, witb all its accidents and missteps, that may be the most chilling part of the story.
The Father in Father is Pleased is a messianic figurehead, there to be loved and respected and obeyed at all costs, but even he’s not safe from the cult he oversees. In a story about themes of power and belief, of life versus death, of deviance and nonconformity, the choices we make have consequences beyond what you can imagine.
Rating: 
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
