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Review
The Devil All The Time is one of GQ's Books of the Year:
"Flannery O'Connor's brutal Wise Blood looks like Sense and Sensibility next to this finely woven, throat-stomping Appalachian crime story."
Praise for The Devil All the Time:
"Pollock's first novel, The Devil All the Time, should cement his reputation as a significant voice in American fiction. ...[He] deftly shifts from one perspective to another, without any clunky transitions—the prose just moves without signal or stumble, opening up the story in new ways again and again...where any prime-time television show can incite nail-biting with a lurking killer, Pollock has done much more. He's layered decades of history, shown the inner thoughts of a collage of characters, and we understand how deeply violence and misfortune have settled into the bones of this place. The question is much more than whether someone will die—it is, can the cycle of bloodletting break? This applies both to the people Pollock so skillfully enlivens as it does to the place he's taken as his literary heritage."—Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
"The Devil All the Time...fulfills the promise in [Pollock's] 2008 short-story collection, Knockemstiff, named after his real-life hometown, where life as is tough as its name suggests. His fictional characters find ways to make it tougher. Devil, as violent as the bloodiest parts of the Old Testament...invites comparisons to Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver, who mined the grace and guilt in the hopeless lives of lost souls....But it's not so much what happens as how Pollock, with the brutal beauty of spare writing, brings it all together."—Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today
"If Pollock’s powerful collection Knockemstiff was a punch to the jaw, his follow-up, a novel set in the violent soul-numbing towns of southern Ohio and West Virginia, feels closer to a mule’s kick, and how he draws these folks and their inevitably hopeless lives without pity is what the kick’s all about. Willard Russell is back from the war, on a Greyhound bus passing through Meade, Ohio, in 1945 when he falls for a pretty waitress in a coffee ship. Haunted by what he’s seen in the Pacific and by the lovely Charlotte, he finds her again, marries her, and has a son, Arvin. But happiness is elusive, and while Willard teaches his only son some serious survival skills (“You just got to pick the right time,” he tells him about getting back at bullies. “They’s a lot of no-good sonofabitches out there"), Charlotte sickens, Willard goes mad—sacrificing animals and worse at his altar in the woods—and Arvin’s sent to his grandmother Emma in Coal Creek. Emma’s also raising Leonora, the daughter of a timid religious mother who was murdered, possibility by her father, Roy, the visiting preacher at the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified, who along with his guitar-playing, crippled cousin, Theodore, in a wheelchair after drinking strychnine to prove his love for Jesus, has disappeared. And there’s on-the-take sheriff Lee Bodecker, whose sister Sandy and her perverted serial killer husband, Carl Henderson, troll the interstates for male hitchhikers he refers to as “models.” Pollock pulls them all together, the pace relentless, and just when it seems like no one can ever catch a break, a good guy does, but not in any predictable way."—Publishers Weekly (starred)
"The God-fearing hard-luck characters who populate Donald Ray Pollock’s debut novel, The Devil All the Time (Doubleday), move through the southern outlands of Ohio and the isolated hollows of West Virginia like figures in a collective nightmare of poverty, addiction, superstition, and crime. Sprung from their rough histories, they mostly prey on their own troubled, downtrodden kin and kind.
Pollock—who spent three decades working at an Ohio paper mill before his 2008 story collection, Knockemstiff (the name of his real-life hometown), garnered widespread acclaim—doesn’t get a word wrong in this super-edgy American Gothic stunner. Here are World War II combat vet Willard Russell and his young son, Arvin, at an outdoor shrine the father has constructed in a fruitless attempt to keep his beautiful young wife from dying of cancer: 'They knelt down and Arvin glanced over at his father’s skinned knuckles…the sounds traveling up the hill from the holler were especially clear that night…the wild hoots and jeers of the drunks reminded the boy of the hunter lying bloody in the mud. His father had taught that man a lesson he would never forget. He closed his eyes and began to pray.'
The flawless cadence of Pollock’s gorgeous shadow-and-light prose plays against the heinous acts of his sorrowful and sometimes just sorry characters, such as lawless preacher Roy and his wheelchair-bound, guitar-playing, pedophile sidekick, Theodore, who stay one scam ahead of the police; and Carl and Sandy, a husband and wife who pick up male hitchhikers and photograph them before dispatching them to a (no doubt) better world.
As Arvin grows up—The Devil All the Time’s narrative arcs from the end of World War II to the late 1960s—life’s twists and turns provide him with a measure of salvation from his own past, and from the people whose soul-damaged lives Pollock has set down so indelibly on the blood-red altar of his incendiary imagination."—Lisa Shea, ELLE magazine
"The Devil All the Time reads as if the love child of O'Connor and Faulkner was captured by Cormac McCarthy, kept in a cage out back and forced to consume nothing but onion rings, Oxycontin and Terrence Malick's Badlands.”—Jeff Baker, The Oregonian
“For fans of No Country for Old Men and Natural Born Killers… [a] grisly Southern Gothic novel that's sure to give you goose bumps no matter how hot the weather gets.”—The Daily Details, DETAILS.com
“Donald Ray Pollock’s engaging and proudly violent first novel…suggests a new category of fiction—grindhouse literary. Subtle characterization: check. Well-crafted sentences: check. Enthusiastic amounts of murder and mayhem: check, check.”—Taylor Antrim, the Daily Beast
"So humid is The Devil All The Time with moral grime that the characters seem always to be grasping for a breath of divine intervention—some through prayer, others through murder and creepy sex."—GQ
“Devil features a bleak and often nightmarish vision of the decades following World War II, a world where redemption, on the rare occasions when it does come to town, rides shotgun with soul-scarring consequences.”—Jason Albert, The Onion/A.V. Club
“Donald Ray Pollock has a flair for creating flawed characters you don't admire but can't help wanting to know more about…. His stories have the same quirky, Appalachian temperament found in the works of Ron Rash or Chuck Kinder, but Pollock defies comparisons.”—Rege Behe, Pittsburgh Tribune Review
“The Devil All the Time is an expansive, decades-spanning slice of Americana … a systematic cataloguing of the horror and hypocrisy that festers in the dark shadow of the American dream.”—Allison Hallett, The Portland Mercury
"[The Devil All the Time is] a world unto its own, a world vividly and powerfully brought to life by a literary stylist who packs a punch as deadly as pulp-fiction master Jim Thompson and as evocative and morally rigorous as Russell Banks."—Tirdad Derakhshani, Philadelphia Inquirer
"Pollock has expanded on [his] storytelling gift for his debut novel, The Devil All the Time. A gallery of reprobates and religious fanatics flutter through these pages. These are multidimensional, flawed human beings. Some pray for better days. Others imagine a resurrection.... Inexorable fate draws these story strands into ever-tightening loops as Pollock’s characters circulate in Ohio, West Virginia and along desolate highways to the south and west....The Devil All the Time is a mesmerizing first novel. It could be cinematized into one heckuva motion picture."—Vick MicKunas, Dayton Daily News
"The world of The Devil All the Time may be geographically just a few dozen miles south of Columbus, but psychologically, it's deep in the heart of hell....The appalling acts these characters commit, and are subjected to, might be unbearable in other hands, but Pollock keeps a certain distance, not wallowing in the details and leaving most of the worst to the imagination. He doesn't extend forgiveness to the characters, but he makes even the most evil of them understandable. He also has the driest and darkest sense of humor. It both cuts through and sharpens much of the horror...Beneath the gothic horror is an Old Testament sense of a moral order in the universe, even if the restoration of that order itself requires violence. As Pollock pulls the strands of his plot together, they reveal patterns both surprising and inevitable."—Margaret Quamme, The Columbus Dispatch
“This novel fulfills the promise made by Pollock’s debut collection, Knockemstiff. He is a real writer, and The Devil All The Time hits you like a telegram from Hell slid under...
"Flannery O'Connor's brutal Wise Blood looks like Sense and Sensibility next to this finely woven, throat-stomping Appalachian crime story."
Praise for The Devil All the Time:
"Pollock's first novel, The Devil All the Time, should cement his reputation as a significant voice in American fiction. ...[He] deftly shifts from one perspective to another, without any clunky transitions—the prose just moves without signal or stumble, opening up the story in new ways again and again...where any prime-time television show can incite nail-biting with a lurking killer, Pollock has done much more. He's layered decades of history, shown the inner thoughts of a collage of characters, and we understand how deeply violence and misfortune have settled into the bones of this place. The question is much more than whether someone will die—it is, can the cycle of bloodletting break? This applies both to the people Pollock so skillfully enlivens as it does to the place he's taken as his literary heritage."—Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
"The Devil All the Time...fulfills the promise in [Pollock's] 2008 short-story collection, Knockemstiff, named after his real-life hometown, where life as is tough as its name suggests. His fictional characters find ways to make it tougher. Devil, as violent as the bloodiest parts of the Old Testament...invites comparisons to Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver, who mined the grace and guilt in the hopeless lives of lost souls....But it's not so much what happens as how Pollock, with the brutal beauty of spare writing, brings it all together."—Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today
"If Pollock’s powerful collection Knockemstiff was a punch to the jaw, his follow-up, a novel set in the violent soul-numbing towns of southern Ohio and West Virginia, feels closer to a mule’s kick, and how he draws these folks and their inevitably hopeless lives without pity is what the kick’s all about. Willard Russell is back from the war, on a Greyhound bus passing through Meade, Ohio, in 1945 when he falls for a pretty waitress in a coffee ship. Haunted by what he’s seen in the Pacific and by the lovely Charlotte, he finds her again, marries her, and has a son, Arvin. But happiness is elusive, and while Willard teaches his only son some serious survival skills (“You just got to pick the right time,” he tells him about getting back at bullies. “They’s a lot of no-good sonofabitches out there"), Charlotte sickens, Willard goes mad—sacrificing animals and worse at his altar in the woods—and Arvin’s sent to his grandmother Emma in Coal Creek. Emma’s also raising Leonora, the daughter of a timid religious mother who was murdered, possibility by her father, Roy, the visiting preacher at the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified, who along with his guitar-playing, crippled cousin, Theodore, in a wheelchair after drinking strychnine to prove his love for Jesus, has disappeared. And there’s on-the-take sheriff Lee Bodecker, whose sister Sandy and her perverted serial killer husband, Carl Henderson, troll the interstates for male hitchhikers he refers to as “models.” Pollock pulls them all together, the pace relentless, and just when it seems like no one can ever catch a break, a good guy does, but not in any predictable way."—Publishers Weekly (starred)
"The God-fearing hard-luck characters who populate Donald Ray Pollock’s debut novel, The Devil All the Time (Doubleday), move through the southern outlands of Ohio and the isolated hollows of West Virginia like figures in a collective nightmare of poverty, addiction, superstition, and crime. Sprung from their rough histories, they mostly prey on their own troubled, downtrodden kin and kind.
Pollock—who spent three decades working at an Ohio paper mill before his 2008 story collection, Knockemstiff (the name of his real-life hometown), garnered widespread acclaim—doesn’t get a word wrong in this super-edgy American Gothic stunner. Here are World War II combat vet Willard Russell and his young son, Arvin, at an outdoor shrine the father has constructed in a fruitless attempt to keep his beautiful young wife from dying of cancer: 'They knelt down and Arvin glanced over at his father’s skinned knuckles…the sounds traveling up the hill from the holler were especially clear that night…the wild hoots and jeers of the drunks reminded the boy of the hunter lying bloody in the mud. His father had taught that man a lesson he would never forget. He closed his eyes and began to pray.'
The flawless cadence of Pollock’s gorgeous shadow-and-light prose plays against the heinous acts of his sorrowful and sometimes just sorry characters, such as lawless preacher Roy and his wheelchair-bound, guitar-playing, pedophile sidekick, Theodore, who stay one scam ahead of the police; and Carl and Sandy, a husband and wife who pick up male hitchhikers and photograph them before dispatching them to a (no doubt) better world.
As Arvin grows up—The Devil All the Time’s narrative arcs from the end of World War II to the late 1960s—life’s twists and turns provide him with a measure of salvation from his own past, and from the people whose soul-damaged lives Pollock has set down so indelibly on the blood-red altar of his incendiary imagination."—Lisa Shea, ELLE magazine
"The Devil All the Time reads as if the love child of O'Connor and Faulkner was captured by Cormac McCarthy, kept in a cage out back and forced to consume nothing but onion rings, Oxycontin and Terrence Malick's Badlands.”—Jeff Baker, The Oregonian
“For fans of No Country for Old Men and Natural Born Killers… [a] grisly Southern Gothic novel that's sure to give you goose bumps no matter how hot the weather gets.”—The Daily Details, DETAILS.com
“Donald Ray Pollock’s engaging and proudly violent first novel…suggests a new category of fiction—grindhouse literary. Subtle characterization: check. Well-crafted sentences: check. Enthusiastic amounts of murder and mayhem: check, check.”—Taylor Antrim, the Daily Beast
"So humid is The Devil All The Time with moral grime that the characters seem always to be grasping for a breath of divine intervention—some through prayer, others through murder and creepy sex."—GQ
“Devil features a bleak and often nightmarish vision of the decades following World War II, a world where redemption, on the rare occasions when it does come to town, rides shotgun with soul-scarring consequences.”—Jason Albert, The Onion/A.V. Club
“Donald Ray Pollock has a flair for creating flawed characters you don't admire but can't help wanting to know more about…. His stories have the same quirky, Appalachian temperament found in the works of Ron Rash or Chuck Kinder, but Pollock defies comparisons.”—Rege Behe, Pittsburgh Tribune Review
“The Devil All the Time is an expansive, decades-spanning slice of Americana … a systematic cataloguing of the horror and hypocrisy that festers in the dark shadow of the American dream.”—Allison Hallett, The Portland Mercury
"[The Devil All the Time is] a world unto its own, a world vividly and powerfully brought to life by a literary stylist who packs a punch as deadly as pulp-fiction master Jim Thompson and as evocative and morally rigorous as Russell Banks."—Tirdad Derakhshani, Philadelphia Inquirer
"Pollock has expanded on [his] storytelling gift for his debut novel, The Devil All the Time. A gallery of reprobates and religious fanatics flutter through these pages. These are multidimensional, flawed human beings. Some pray for better days. Others imagine a resurrection.... Inexorable fate draws these story strands into ever-tightening loops as Pollock’s characters circulate in Ohio, West Virginia and along desolate highways to the south and west....The Devil All the Time is a mesmerizing first novel. It could be cinematized into one heckuva motion picture."—Vick MicKunas, Dayton Daily News
"The world of The Devil All the Time may be geographically just a few dozen miles south of Columbus, but psychologically, it's deep in the heart of hell....The appalling acts these characters commit, and are subjected to, might be unbearable in other hands, but Pollock keeps a certain distance, not wallowing in the details and leaving most of the worst to the imagination. He doesn't extend forgiveness to the characters, but he makes even the most evil of them understandable. He also has the driest and darkest sense of humor. It both cuts through and sharpens much of the horror...Beneath the gothic horror is an Old Testament sense of a moral order in the universe, even if the restoration of that order itself requires violence. As Pollock pulls the strands of his plot together, they reveal patterns both surprising and inevitable."—Margaret Quamme, The Columbus Dispatch
“This novel fulfills the promise made by Pollock’s debut collection, Knockemstiff. He is a real writer, and The Devil All The Time hits you like a telegram from Hell slid under...
Product Description
From the acclaimed author of Knockemstiff—called “powerful, remarkable, exceptional” by the Los Angeles Times—comes a dark and riveting vision of 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.
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.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
"Some people were born just so they could be buried...",
By
This review is from: The Devil All the Time (Hardcover)
[This review was originally published at The Nervous Breakdown.]If you've heard of Donald Ray Pollock, it was probably due to his collection of interlinked short stories, Knockemstiff published back in 2009, set in the titular town. His debut novel, The Devil All the Time (Doubleday) treads similar ground, spending most of its time in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, tracking and recording a wide range of psychopathic behaviors by a motley crew of misfits and delinquents. What Pollock does so well is create a place and time where nothing he says or shows us is beyond belief. From the beginning we see how things are in Knockemstiff, and we understand the desperation, the need for prayer, the aching hope that something will change and improve. 'Four hundred or so people lived in Knockemstiff in 1957, nearly all of them connected by blood through one God-forsaken calamity or another, be it lust or necessity or just plain ignorance. Along with the tar-papered shacks and cinder block houses, the holler included two general stores and a Church of Christ in Christian Union and a joint known throughout the township as the Bull Pen.' We follow a large cast of screwed up people, starting with Arvin Eugene Russell, who witnesses the death of his mother from disease, and the suicide of his father, damaged and distraught by the loss of his wife. Arvin is forced to worship and beg at a praying log, the forest drenched with blood, rotting carcasses and handmade crosses littering the ground, the stench and desperate act nothing short of abuse. When local lawman, Lee Boedecker shows up, he is shocked to find such ruins: 'Bodecker lifted his flashlight. Animals in various states of decay hung all around them, some in the branches and others from tall wooden crosses. A dead dog with a leather collar around its neck was nailed up high to one of the crosses like some kind of hideous sacrifice. The head of a deer lay at the foot of another.' Arvin eventually sets out on the road and leaves behind his tortured past, but the road is not easy or kind. Out on the highways and back roads are people like his neighbors, Carl and Sandy Henderson. Carl likes to take pictures of his naked wife fondling strange men, before and after he puts a bullet in the stunned hitchhikers, leaving bodies all over the southern states. Sandy bartends and whores, quick to jump in the sack with whatever man gives her an iota of grace and kindness, never phased by the violence she witnesses up close. We also follow a preacher, Roy, and his crippled, deviant guitarist Theodore, as they travel from a bewildered church to a circus filled with horny bird-women and drunken clowns to a desperate life as field hands and hobos. Carl and Sandy have cast a wide net, and eventually they pull in the tired, beaten down Roy, and ask him to be one of their models. We come to expect the worst, so when it arrives we are not shocked, but instead hypnotized, wondering when the dark souls who dance about the page will finally get their comeuppance. We wait for justice to descend, for all of the cruel, violent acts to be punished, for the righteous to be redeemed in the end. By slowing down time, and allowing us to stare unflinching at the death and destruction that unfolds in the hot shadows of the back woods and gravel roads, immersed in the constant thrumming of the buzzing cicadas, we bare witness to these acts, so we may testify later of these atrocities. Take this moment from a late scene (the identity of the character hidden so as not to spoil your read): 'Something cold began to crawl over him. He felt his body start to sink into a hole that seemed to be opening up beneath him in the ground, and it scared him, that feeling, the way it sucked the breath right out of him. Gritting his teeth, he fought to climb out before he sank in to deep. He felt himself rising. Yes, by God, he could still fix things'but he was having trouble finding the air. Then something with huge black wings settled on top of him, pushing him down again; and even though he grabbed frantically at the grass and dirt with his left hand to keep from slipping, he couldn't stop himself this time.' What Donald Ray Pollock has created in The Devil All the Time is a dark, engaging portrait of human nature. He shows us what happens when there is nothing to believe in, when there is little chance of things getting better, when instead of the grace of God whispering in your ear it's the devil'all the time. This novel is not for the weak of mind or heart. It is for the devout, those with strong character and a firm grip on their own ascent into heaven.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dark, Compelling, Top-Notch Fiction,
By
This review is from: The Devil All the Time (Hardcover)
Reason for Reading: I love dark southern fiction. The type of book where the characters reach redemption by the end or at least try to, but they all, mostly, end up dead anyway.This is indeed a dark book and I just loved it! The story revolves around three separate pairs of individuals who eventually share some ties, but most of all they connect with Arvin Eugene Russell, the orphan of one of the individuals. The book starts out with the story of Willard and Charlotte Russell. Willard marries Charlotte soon after he comes back from WWII, they move out into the back country, have a son and then Willard is tormented as his wife is ravished by cancer and he sacrifices buckets of blood to his "prayer log." Next are spider handling preacher Roy and his crippled guitar playing sidekick Theodore, fakers, who end up running from the law for murder. And finally there is photographer Carl and Sandy Henderson husband-and-wife serial killer team who every summer "go on the road" and randomly brutalize and kill men. But joining all three together is Arvin Eugene Russell, orphaned son of Will and Charlene, who grows up to be a good man but with a violence of his own. This was a page-turner for me that I completed easily over the course of two days. Not only was the story compelling in an often-times gut-wrenchingly perverse manner, but there were times when one saw how some of the antagonists had started off as victims themselves. The writing is topnotch and the characterization of a whole cast of people who are mostly downright unlikable and unsympathetic yet somehow ultimately human is finely-tuned. A mixture of religion, southern Gothic and haunting people, places and plots creates a dark story indeed. Not suitable for those who like happy endings. I found the ending redemptive and satisfying but those who like most characters to be alive at book's end will find this is not the book for them.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.5 out of 5 stars (115 customer reviews) 74 of 81 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
YOU EVER HITCHHIKE?,
By Pamela A. Poddany "Book Freak!" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Devil All the Time (Hardcover)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
THE DEVIL ALL THE TIMEFasten your seat belt, stop the world, you will want to get off and read this book in one sitting, then you'll be sorry when you are finished. Donald Ray Pollock's writing slams into your mind and soul and will not let you go. Ever. This book is intense, frightening, wonderful, poignant, alarming, and magnificent. The characters you will meet -- and I wouldn't want to meet many of them in a dark alley -- are bizarre, menacing, church-going, God-fearing, alarming, and sometimes loving folk. The people in this book are so fleshed-out and real and the types of human beings you pray you will never actually have the pleasure of meeting. The setting is in West Virginia and Ohio, the backroads of rural America. Folks are poor and down-trodden, homes are ramshackle and filthy. We meet Willard Russell who has served his time in the South Pacific and can't get over the brutality of war. The war leaves him wounded in his mind but he hopes to put all of that behind him when he meets and falls in love with the beautiful Charlotte. Willard and Charlotte have a son, Arvin Eugene. We also meet Carl and Sandy Henderson, married psychopaths who have a terrifying and disturbing hobby. Two other stand-out characters are a preacher, Roy, and his wheelchair bound partner, Theodore; both are on the lamb. All of these lives become jumbled and tangled together, making for one heck of a story. The plot is fast paced and I couldn't turn the pages quickly enough. Pollock's descriptions of the characters were so vivid and dynamic you can almost see their greased back hair, smell their cheap perfume, and taste the whiskey and/or coffee they are chugging down. The entire time I was reading and loving this book, I couldn't stop feeling totally appalled and wondering how I could LOVE such a story-line -- one filled with death, depravations, strange, odd, totally weird people. A book that made me look at people out in public in a totally new and different and not good way. A book that had me rechecking the locks on my doors. A book I will recommend to others and a book I will never forget. Pollock's extreme talent in writing is the reason why I could absolutely love and highly recommend such a disturbing and wildly wonderful book. Pollock had me sitting on the edge of my seat the entire time, being shocked and reshocked over and over again. The story line twists and turns, taking you places you never dreamed of, never once was I correct when I thought I had everything all figured out -- not once. Dang. Pollock has one previous book, KNOCKEMSTIFF. Don't miss that one either. This man is talented and here's hoping he graces us with more of his fantastic work. Thanks -- Pam 20 of 22 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
If you like this genre, you'll love this book,
By T. K. Paul "imatyak" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Devil All the Time (Hardcover)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
There are some quite slimy characters that seem completely unrealistic until you think about the real stories of evangelsits, Appalachian living conditions, and serial killers during the 1940s through the '60s. The author does an excellent job of using this time period as one of the story's background features instead of a history lesson.There are times I was reading the book that I couldn't believe that a particularly horrific aspect to a crime warranted only a breif sentence - often the last sentence of a chapter. My mouth would drop open, I'd say, "Ewwww, that's sick," out loud, and then quickly turn the page to start the next chapter. I was very pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed this book as much as I did. I started it yesterday morning after finishing a very long, tedious read (1,100+ pages) and just finished this afternoon. I did not expect to find this story as absorbing as I did. There was no point in the book where I could comfortably take a break, so I read through meals, laundry, and while I should have been sleeping. I was always too anxious to see what was going to happen next to put it down. Nothing in this book is predictable. If you like this book, I also suggest "Sweetheart" by Chelsea Cain. 12 of 12 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Flannery O'Connor Fan? Then You'll Loooove This Novel!,
By C. E. Selby "Eric Selby" - Published on Amazon.com
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This review is from: The Devil All the Time (Hardcover)
When Terry Gross interviewed Donald Ray Pollock on "Fresh Air" (NPR), the author, in his down-home voice, said that he often would type out published stories he liked for the purpose of studying how the author wrote them. I don't recall his mentioning Flannery O'Connor. But almost from the moment I started reading this novel, the voice of Ms. O'Connor was like an overlay of Mr. Pollock's. That is meant as a compliment. Let me cite a passage from the novel--and if you have ever read the haunting "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by O'Connor, you must see what I mean:The couple had been roaming the Midwest for several weeks during the summer of 1965, always on the hunt, two nobodies in a black Ford station wagon purchased for one hundred dollars... The man on the passenger's side was turning to fat and believed in signs and had a habit of picking his decayed teeth with a Buck pocketknife. The woman always drove and wore tight shorts and flimsy blouses that showed off her pale, bony body in a way they both thought enticing. She chain-smoked any kind of menthol cigarettes...while he chewed on cheap black cigars that he called dog dicks... These are not people you want moving into your neighborhood although that wouldn't be a problem since they have an interest in hitchhikers. Why? Well... I'm not telling although I will go back to O'Connor and remind you that the grandmother was just a little too trusting. Stupid and too trusting, just like the characters in this wonderful novel. These are not cartoon-ish characters although some might think so when first meeting them. They live in an existential world--our world--where many of them are totally clueless about the horrors occurring around them but go to prayer believing that prayer will bring them better lives. And then toss in things that seem more like some type of Hicksville voodism. Ever heard of a prayer log? No. Well, read this novel. I think, like me, you will laugh but then immediately think, "But this is too horrible for me to be laughing at," telling you something about yourself. And that is so O'Connoresque. So Pollockesque. If I could give this six stars I would. |
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