Please, Daddy, No – 2006 – Sadistic Perversion
I found Please Daddy No in a second-hand bookstore a few weeks ago. Actually, I had seen it there many times before I bought it. I usually but a lot of books without ever starting to read them. It’s the same with movies and music, I buy stuff but never find the time to enjoy many of my findings. Recently I’ve started to read again though. I might not be a fast reader, and I need something that affects me to keep interest, but when I find something I like I usually stick to it and read as much as I can. Please, Daddy, No took me a couple of days. It’s not long so I wouldn’t call it a big achievement.
If there’s a big achievement to be found it’s rather to cope with the sadistic perversions described. Just like A Child Called It or the story about Yolanda it focuses on the experiences of a very young child. Unlike A Child Called it, the torture and molestation are purely sexual in Please Daddy No. At least to begin with. There’s a lot of pain described. Both physical and mental. The torture goes on all levels. The description of the father’s sexual perversions is very thorough and explicit. He doesn’t seem to have a heart at any point of the story.
Please, Daddy, No tells the true story of Stuart Howarth who got sexually molested by his father as a child. The father also molested his sisters, of which one of them was physically handicapped. It’s obvious that the father gets off on feeling the total power over the children. There’s double punishment and as I said before, a lot of painful treatment and a lot of words describing Stuarts feelings during his upbringing. Just like A Child Called It, there’s a lot of talking about how he loved his daddy anyway. Or at least wanted to love him. How he didn’t know that what he was exposed to was unnormal. How could any child know if they never knew anything else?
But the upbringing is just the first part of the story. We also learn that Stuart looks up his father many years later and confronts him. In this process, Stuart kills his father. He confesses his crime and is sent to prison. There, he learns that the system doesn’t work and that some of the guards are as sadistic as his father was. It’s a touching story about how he never really understand if he’s been a bad boy or not. He never learned from his upbringing what the difference is.
The description of the long struggle, with both continuous abuse and humiliation and self-inflicted pain, never gets boring. It’s interesting until the last page is over and then you feel like you would like to know more about what happened after. Stuart sues the prison and he wins the case, but what happened next?
