Fail Sons

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

When Ben 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 Ben 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 Ben needs to get back home to New York before his wife goes into labor.

It’s the summer of 2021. 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.