Fathers Synopsis

On a seemingly normal night and without explanation, the world turns into a nightmare. The story of Fathers centers around a transformed and unnamed metropolis and the three normal people trapped in it. The enormous variation between quadrants in a city gets enhanced by a layer of modern horror. In some office buildings, the drone workers have become so bland that their faces have melted away, and they unresponsively follow the patterns that they know every day. The malls are full of howling shapes and angry juggernauts who will injure and kill and satisfy their needs. And some places, like the carnival, are barely recognizable through the veil of charnal strangeness. The three main characters must navigate the city to find their missing piece and plumb the depths of their own fear and anxiety.

Paul Moeller, a compulsive womanizer tortured by his guilt over his loving but clueless wife, thinks at first that the transformation is because of a drug overdose. Wandering through the city, he follows the specter of a boy who claims to be his son, he at first reacts to the nightmare as if it's some kind of joke, but after an agonizing withdrawal passes, he realizes that he's in over his head. When Paul finds one of his bitter ex-girlfriends, almost a weightless, mindless husk, she tells him that she never gave his son up for adoption; she aborted the baby after he abandoned her. Pursued by monsters and visions of his wife tormented by chains and demons, Paul chases after the ghost of redemption by following his son into the heart of the city.

Madeleine “Lenny” Kennington is an army brat whose father died in combat. She keeps a picture of him by her bedside, while her busy mom scrapes together a minimalistic suburban existence. Left mostly to her own devices, Lenny goes to bars and sleeps with servicemen, until one day she finds a man she swears could be her beloved father, in the flesh. After he politely refuses her advances, she follows him into the city—as she sees the way the metropolis is changing, she becomes convinced that the man actually is her father. Her goodness and gentleness become tested as she finds each of her brothers, who have become violent victims of the city's transformation.

Dinah King found out that she was pregnant on her 40th birthday. A career cop who has never married, she has no idea who the father is, but she resolves to keep the child. Her friends begin to worry when she tells them her unborn child wants her to go into the city to save the world. It gets worse when the baby tests positive for Downs syndrome. After walking through her stationhouse and witnessing a massacre that doesn't seem to harm her, she decides to follow her instincts and go into the city to give birth to her prophetic child and hopefully find out what his origins have to do with the changing of the world.

At first a kind of horror interpretation of the Wizard of Oz, the three meet and journey together at intervals until they reach the heart of the city. There is a literal pulling-back of a curtain, only to find nothing. No explanation for why the world is different and no higher voice to give them direction. Discovering suddenly that they're masters of their own destinies, they have no choice but to make their own decisions. Paul stays in the nightmare to raise his child, enduring the relentless assault of his vengeful wife who he neglected. Lenny sacrifices the memories of her father and returns to the real world to watch her brothers buried as heroes, even though they died as villainous reflections of their real selves. Dinah gives birth to a demon and has to choose: raise a monstrous baby who could be normal among the nightmares or go back home where her child could potentially destroy the world. She decides to risk apocalypse.