Books › The devil all the time
The devil all the time
a novel
272 pages
A pitch-black, blood-soaked descent into the darkest corners of American religion and generational trauma.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like driving down a pitch-black Appalachian highway with no headlights, waiting for a crash you know is coming. It is a masterclass in dread, weaving a propulsive, suffocating web of intersecting lives that are all hurtling toward inevitable violence. The atmosphere is grimy and oppressive, steeped in the sweat of corrupted faith and the inescapable weight of generational trauma. The prose is brutally unadorned, delivering moments of shocking depravity with a matter-of-fact detachment that makes them all the more horrifying. It is not a book that offers hope or redemption, but rather a mesmerizing, unflinching stare into the abyss. This is a must-read for fans of pitch-black grit lit and Southern Gothic who appreciate a narrative that refuses to look away from the darkest edges of the human soul.
- Mood
- dread-soaked
- oppressive
- macabre
- grimy
- Tone
- unflinching
- bleak
- gritty
- matter-of-fact
- cynical
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- corrupted faith · generational violence · moral decay · the dark underbelly of America · inescapable trauma
- The writing
- Muscular, unadorned, and brutally direct, delivering grotesque imagery with a chillingly detached precision.
- The arc
- Begins in a suffocating atmosphere of inherited trauma and spirals relentlessly downward into a bloody, inevitable reckoning.
- Who it's for
- Readers with a strong stomach who crave pitch-black Appalachian noir and unflinching explorations of human depravity.
Content notes
- graphic violence
- animal cruelty
- sexual assault
- religious abuse
- gore
- suicide
About the book
ABOUT THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME A dark and riveting vision of 1960s America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree.
In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic overtones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting.
Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.
Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.
Description from Open Library.
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