Alfred Eaker: writer, author

Alfred Eaker is a prolific fine arts painter and muralist, an award-winning filmmaker and film critic, and a traditionally-published author and novelist.

Born in the Midwest in 1964, Eaker grew up in an intensely religious household. Although Eaker’s family was an extreme mix of contrasting faiths, he was predominantly exposed to what he calls, “dyed-in-the-wool, ho de ho, sawdust on the floor, backwoods Pentecostalism,” which he rebelled against at an early age. Encouraged to draw during church services as a way to keep himself occupied, Eaker’s interest in art intensified to an almost obsessive degree, expanding eventually into filmmaking, film criticism and finally, as a novelist.

Eaker’s debut novel: “Brother Cobweb”

Alfred Eaker’s debut novel “Brother Cobweb” paints the horrific and comically surreal evangelical universe of his actual upbringing. Prophecy is at the root of this barely fictionalized novel, but it’s not cut from the same prophetic cloth as the novel’s pseudo-Christian cult. Rather, it is prophetic in the snapshot of an ignorant religious right that has long been seeking its Antichrist to fulfill their apocalyptic lust. They eventually found him in President Donald J. Trump. As a childhood friend of Eaker’s observed, “Trump’s America is exactly like what we were raised in, but on a national level.

Eaker draws an astute portrait of alt-right Evangelical Americans who are determined to force their Armageddon upon the country and world . We can see how their hostility toward science and education, lust for a militant white authoritarianism, undeniable brutality and hypocrisy has been brewing throughout the sixties and seventies, only to see it erupt after that black man contaminated “OUR WHITE House.” Welcome to the Talibangelical America.

Hell hath no fury like the Conservative Victim Card but Brother Cobweb is not for them. It is as brutal as they are, but in place of their annihilation, “Brother Cobweb“ seeks redemption. Travel back 50 years and join Eaker’s Calvin on the pews of backwoods Pentecostal church to witness the monstrosity of American Fascism, cloaked in a flag and carrying a cross. Look inside “Brother Cobweb,” the novel, and get a taste of Donald Trump and the pews that bred him…

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Reactions to “Brother Cobweb”

Brother Cobweb has received well deserved recognition from fellow authors, artists, and visionaries. It has even crossed continents and has been noted and endorsed by European newspapers.

Following on the success of the novel amongst the general public, Eaker is currently collaborating with Todd M. Coe on the related Graphic novel “The Brother Cobweb Chronicles.” The first volume with be released in 2021.

The audiobook version is also being produced and will soon be available and distributed. Until then, here is a taste of Alfred Eaker himself playing “Brother Cobweb”, an apocalyptic Pentecostal pastor (a composite of Eaker’s childhood preachers) and through whom we can see much that is wrong with the American Religious Right.

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Alfred Eaker: filmmaker and film critic

After attending art school and dabbling in performance art for a number of years, Eaker started an independent film company and produced a number of independent films: the feature “Jesus and the Gospel of Yes,” the short “Behold the Man” (about his friend and fellow artist, the late Ed Sanders), a second feature, “W The Movie,” that surreally satirized George Bush, and two short films for the 48 Hour Film Festival, “Hallow’s Dance” and “9.” Eaker has recently finished a feature-length documentary about artist Raymond Thunder-Sky and the Cincinnati gallery named after him. In addition to “Thunder-Sky,” Eaker is in the early stages of an existential film, entitled “Stations,” which he is collaborating on with artist Wendy Collin Sorin, poet John M. Bennett and filmmaker James Mannan.

In addition to being an award-winning independent filmmaker, Eaker has been a film critic (for 366 Weird Movies) for over a decade. His essays for that site have been published in the yearbooks and quoted in various film biographies.

In his career as an artist, Eaker’s work has been paradoxically labeled as degenerate, orthodox, heterodox, modernist, mystical theology, provocative, academic, and blasphemous. Indeed, blasphemy is a language that Eaker seems to speak fluently, even when he doesn’t mean to, and he’s been doing it through painting, performance art, independent film, and film criticism for three decades. After his novel “Brother Cobweb,” many would accuse him now of being a Prophet…

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Alfred Eaker at work, as a filmmaker and actor