Fail Sons

An absurdist road novel about two sons carrying their father's cryogenically frozen body to its final resting place

When Scott Platt's brother, Nick, calls to ask him to fly to Arizona and retrieve their father’s body from the Cryo Center where it’s been frozen since the nineties, the timing couldn’t be worse: he’s forty, unemployed, and spiraling as he and his wife await the birth of their first child. Nick’s as tightly wound as Scott is adrift, and the brothers have never gotten along. But the Cryo Center’s shutting down, and they’ve got six days to haul their father’s frozen body to a new facility in Massachusetts—without letting it thaw past –109°. And Scott needs to get back home to New York before his wife goes into labor.

It’s the summer of 2022. The country’s still reeling from the pandemic. And driving a corpse cross-country in a U-Haul through Red State America proves predictably chaotic. Nick insists on wearing a KN95 the entire time. They pass through deserts, mountains, and plains, meeting Aryan cops, ex-Mormon hitchhikers, a Gen Z commune, and MAGA-hat-wearing Walmart clerks. They play blackjack, take shrooms, and swim under the stars—all while trying to keep the body frozen and their relationship from melting down.

Fail Sons is a darkly funny and deeply felt update of As I Lay Dying for the 21st century. Told in the fragmented style of Dept. of Speculation, Adam Wilson’s novel is a brilliant exploration of masculinity, grief, and the ways we carry the dead—and each other—across a divided America.Adam Wilson is the author of the short story collection What's Important is Feeling and the novels Flatscreen and Sensation Machines. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, and The Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and Flatscreen was a National Jewish Book Award finalist and an Indie Next Pick and was translated into German and Italian. Wilson has taught in the creative writing programs at Columbia and NYU. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son. Visit him online at adamwilsonwriter.com.