Electric Literature: “D. Foy’s Patricide, his second novel, is an unusual hybrid that pushes against the edges of literary fiction with the unfiltered violence, frustration, and angst typically found in noir novels, but does so with an elegance and lyricism that echo giants like Cormac McCarthy and Walt Whitman . . . Behind the blitzkrieg of ideas and lyricism, Patricide is a celebration of language. Foy constantly alternates between writing that sustains conversations with thinkers like Foucault and Freud and one-line paragraphs that rival David Foster Wallace’s most vivacious passages. This is writing that erupts like a volcano of words and then folds in on itself only to begin the explosive process all over again.”

Literary Hub: “Brutal beauty and beautiful brutality abound in D. Foy’s latest novel, Patricide, where memory and its more colorful companions—regret, blame, guilt, nostalgia, mourning, veneration, repression, trauma, dread, introspection, recurrence, reflection, truth—take center stage. Foy sculpts his novel with, simultaneously, the blunt force of a hammer, the soft touch of a brush, and the sharp precision of a scalpel. His sentences stay with you; his questions infect your thoughts. “Where do they come from, your memories? Where have the images that make your memories been hiding across the years?” You could cite influences here—everyone from Samuel Beckett to Gertrude Stein, Franz Kafka to Herman Melville, Witold Gombrowicz to Jack Kerouac—but as much as D. Foy’s writing is a memory of those pasts, it is also something that feels fresh, new, alive.”

Los Angeles Review of Books: “Foy has written a father and son tale for our time, in a lyrical and philosophical mode that makes this old story new . . . Foy has a prose style that matches his subject matter — it shakes and rattles the reader, switching from first to third person and jumping around in chronology. This is a war story and how one may or may not survive it.”


The Brooklyn Rail: “The style of Patricide proves, throughout, its wildest gambit. Foy works against the prevailing currents of literary culture, refusing to be a smart aleck . . . It’s a daunting pileup, for some readers—but for me the stuff of the Watts Towers. To visit the Towers, too, a person’s got to travel through a slum, often violent, and yet the place proves transcendent . . . Foy has brought off a new brand of the American tragedy, baroquely layered and yet defying gravity.”

Rain Taxi: “Patricide rumbles with violence, even when there’s none to be seen on the page. A dark, brave, complicated tale, it speaks to the rages that linger in men through generations, confronting the lashes provoked by cowardice, power, and addiction, and the crippled bonds that string fathers and sons together . . . These bursts surge like a wild river, increasing the very pace in which each syllable is consumed . . . Even when he’s not writing in this direct method, speeding up or slowing down time, Foy uses sharp, playful language and shrewd pop culture references to tell Pat’s travails . . . These narrative choices are brilliant, and they prove that, if Foy were a preacher, he’d have his congregation sitting on the edges of their pews every Sunday, hanging on the charm of his words.”

The Nervous Breakdown: “Patricide inhabits this no-man’s land between dreams and their dreamers, a realm of drooling ghosts who refuse to speak their (father’s) name. Patricide refuses forgiveness because there is nothing to forgive. It refuses judgement in the best documentary tradition that contends that any moral high ground is a travesty. . . Is this a bleak novel? Hardly. It is glorious. Not only because of its lyricisms that are a cauldron of Ginsberg, Whitman, Bukowski, Dickinson, Duras, and Beckett, but also because of its Penrose Stair-like structure that is Escher-like in its possible impossibility—a metaphor for the father itself.”

American Book Review: “A complex work of brilliance . . . Foy proves himself a true innovator: by linking the poetic with the intellectual, he reveals the logic of the former and the mystery of the latter, resulting in something new: the woeful music of logical introspection, the rhetoric of unreasonable grief. It is with this invented, linguistic logic that he fuses the otherwise disparate parts of Patricide, and thus creating new ways of understanding suffering, and how illuminating it can sometimes be.

Fanzine: Patricide is a remarkably timely story given our current toxic political climate . . . Foy places readers at the center of these turbulent confrontations, witnesses to the characters’ compulsions and bad choices. As you turn the pages, unable to look away from the compounding damage, a radical empathy accrues for these battered people . . . Patricide is a primal howl of a novel that slowly – as your ears become attuned – sounds like a classic aria.

Chicago Review of Books: “Patricide is a brutal revelation . . . The mental metamorphosis is difficult, even grisly, but there’s much more to this one than brutality for its own sake: fragmented reportage becomes something resembling cohesive redemption by its end . . . a contradiction of its own, the ability to break from the grooved path of lineage to the frightening unfamiliarity of love and self-care.”

Ploughshares: In Patricide, Foy speaks beautifully, in hauntingly poetic prose—repetition-rich, yet always reaching deeper—of the difficulty humans have in trying to love others, even love life, when they have had no experience of being loved. Our protagonist, somehow, after a litany of failures to love, does come through the experience. His story is so wrenching, but ultimately not depressing, because of his commitment to understanding himself. And we the readers gain from this long and fruitful struggle.

Volume 1 Brooklyn: “Patricide is a literary gut-punch on the most personal of levels . . . It will take the most traumatizing memory of your childhood and beat you to a pulp with it. Then it will stand you up, dust you off, and walk away without a single word of remorse. Only then will you be ready to begin . . . I suggest you delve into the book itself, and appreciate what D. Foy has gone through to bring into the world – a truly American classic about the failure we try to ignore, and the survival we are capable of.”

The Rumpus: In a world where we heap praises on writers who focus on middle-class people with middle-class problems, writers such as D. Foy, and novels such as Patricide, are rare, welcome, and refreshing . . . Foy thrusts us into a raw and detached world, one free of ornamentation and contrived emotions. It’s a tone you’ll only encounter in writers who dominate their craft.

Chronogram: “Brutally abused by both of his parents, the haunted narrator of Patricide battles addiction, relationships, and ‘my father’s giant Voice’ like a gonzo gladiator. This raw-whisky novel . . . is a rough ride in a golden chariot. Foy’s sentences soar. ‘Then a velveteen roar mounted in his head, a hundred thousand sirens singing in the belly of a dreaming cave.’“

Volume 1 Brooklyn: “Made to Break, D. Foy’s first novel, examined the tensions and fissures within a group of friends as they went on a trip that turned harrowing. For his second novel, Patricide, Foy narrows the scope and shifts his lens to the topic of family—as the title suggests, a particularly wrenching father/son relationship, conveyed with a blend of visceral detail and philosophical nuance.”

CLASH Media: “This is the best literary novel you’ll read this year. Foy delivers in a way that makes other literary fiction authors cry when no one is looking.”

LitReactor: “D. Foy’s voice is unlike anything else on the shelves today . . . His whipcrack debut, Made to Break, caused a stir in literary circles—so many people were talking about it. His second novel, Patricide, is . . . the kind of book that tells you its story by grabbing you by the back of the neck and pulling you close; both intimate and intense.”

JMWW: “Much praise has been sung of Foy’s hand at the line level and I cannot add anything to its commendations; from where I sit, the acclaim is, in my not at all humble opinion, completely accurate and better expressed than I may try to. Take everyone’s word for how good the prose is . . . The narrator’s memories, his childhood, his parents, his lovers, friends, enemies, bullies, memories of other’s memories, the recalled feelings, sights, sounds, smells, of any moment, are all etherized on the page . . . Probing the emotional, situational, and motivating factors of a single moment are wonders to read. I could read a whole book like this. These vignettes are no less well-crafted, no less loaded with meaning than the more stylized segments. Together they give the book a delirious range of reading experience.”