Paterfamilias

A loving husband and father is feeling pressure from all sides. His publisher's editorial demands. His wife's concerns about his increasingly erratic behavior. His constant need to prove himself worthy of his skewed sense of masculinity. His former creative partner's enraged husband seeking revenge for a misguided indiscretion. And the tumor-covered mutant freak slipping through an inter-dimensional aperture in Baby Gabbie's nursery to steal her away to an alternate dimension full of monstrous horrors. Guided by the memory of a fatal accident he caused as a pre-teen, this family man will do anything he's forced to do to save the life he has built-including making a beast of himself on this or any plane of existence.

Told by an unnamed, unreliable narrator in second person to force back-breaking paranoia and choking dread into the reader's personal headspace, Paterfamilias is relentlessly bleak, experimental, steeped in gore, and informed by every awful lesson taught to little boys trying to make men of themselves.

Paterfamilias is a violent, surreal nightmare-a slow-walk into insanity that, in a strange and disturbing way, reflects every father's fears, every husband's shame, every man's insecurities. When you finish this book, told in a clever second-person perspective, it will force you to reckon with your darkest instincts and reassure yourself that you're nothing like its protagonist...right?

-Dane Erbach, author of Meat Bees

Paterfamilias isn't about toxic masculinity so much as it's about primal masculinity. Feral, limbic, eat or be eaten masculinity. Masculinity as affliction unto death. Wielding the 2nd person like a self-berating cudgel, Gregorio either takes us careening pell-mell through a devolution into cro-magnon madness, or else slowly brings us to grips with the fact that that's where we were all along. Your mileage to hell may vary, but either way it's a hell of a ride.

-David Fitzgerald, author of Troll

Tortuous, plaguing, and dismaying. Gregorio's ambitious novel invents a new synonym for horror.

-Josh Dale, author of RAGE: Stories