Brother Cobweb in the News

Interviews

Interview Novena News : Alfred Eaker, author of ‘Brother Cobweb’: We, the laity, are the Church, not the hierarchy. It needs us prodigals.”

Brother Cobweb was released by Open Books Press this Easter. The novel revolves around a Midwestern Pentecostal church and family, but it is broader in its criticisms, reaching from the seeds of Mormon abuse out into Catholicism and its wider social structures.

Mada Jurado, Novena News: advanced review for our novel, Brother Cobweb

His words contain such a direct and brutal message that it’s impossible to remain indifferent; you’ll feel the same raw energy and transforming power as a gaze from any of his painted portraits. Art at its best.

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Advanced Reviews

Advanced review for our novel, Brother Cobweb (Catherine Swan Reimer Ed.D., Counseling Psychologist, PhD)

Terrorists — usually thought of as enemies of a country — can also be found within families who have access to terrorize a helpless child daily…

Amaya Engleking: Advanced review for “Brother Cobweb”

As with his surreal and mystical paintings, Alfred Eaker’s Brother Cobweb portrays both the beauty and the horrifying distortion in the search for self-identity and purpose, all while having been deeply entangled in the swampy roots of a kitschy, hamburger-helper, “slut-for-Jesus” brand of Pentecostalism.

Early Review for our novel, Brother Cobweb by Jason Pannone

Alfred Eaker’s story is a harrowing tale of violence, abuse, lies, and conflict — yet it ends in hope. There is redemption: in art, beauty, friendship, love, and God, where, in the midst of sin and the wreckage of life, the light of grace pours abundantly through the cracks and crevices.

Early review for our novel “Brother Cobweb,” by Fr. Justin Belitz OFM

Artists have the uncanny ability to recognize the beauty in challenging and difficult life experiences. This is exactly what Alfred Eaker has done with this novel…

Early Review for the novel Brother Cobweb by author Cheryl Townsend

Opening with the ranting of a Pentecostal preacher into the mind of seven-year old Calvin Elkan, who in lieu of attention, creates art in a drawing pad as his derrière numbs atop a hard pew. A caricature of near monster features, Brother Cobweb is born, a minister of pseudo-satanic lunacy.

Early Review for Brother Cobweb by artist/author Michelle Moore

A tale of resiliency, reconciliation, and redemption, with plenty of ass-kicking and comeuppance along the way, Brother Cobweb is a powerful account of self-discovery that will resonate with readers long after the final pages . . .

Keith Banner, EARLY REVIEW FOR BROTHER COBWEB

By the end of Brother Cobweb, you have insight not only into what it means to be free of a religion you don’t need, but also what it feels like to find an actual spirituality that can carry you through.

JONATHAN MONTALDO. AN Early review for the novel “Brother Cobweb”

No easy, happy endings to this well-told, fast-paced story about the role of “God” in freakish human experience. Eaker’s novel draws a complex picture of religion in which the Weird is graphically made flesh…

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Look inside “Brother Cobweb,” the Novel

“Brother Cobweb” is now available through Open Books Press, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and all major bookshops and distributors. If you want to understand the seed of Trump’s America, travel back in time 50 years and witness firsthand those who empowered him; the religious right white Evangelicals who are in fact Christian in name only talibangelicals hell bent on a self-fulfilled apocalypse…