Devil All the Time - Softcover

Pollock, Donald Ray

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846555418 ISBN 13: 9781846555411

Publisher: Harvill Secker, 2011

Synopsis

"The Devil All the Time" is a hauntingly intense portrait of America and a shattering vision of violence and redemption. Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, it follows a cast of riveting and bizarre characters from the end of the Second World War to the 1960s. Willard Russell is a tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific who can't save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from a slow death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his 'prayer log'. Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, trawl America's highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. The spider-handling preacher Roy, and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, are 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 plot lines into a taut, gothic 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.

About this title

Review:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2011: With The Devil All the Time, author Donald Ray Pollock has crafted an exceptionally gritty, twisted page-turner. This follow-up to 2008's Knockemstiff is set in the Midwest during the mid-century, but reads more like a gothic Western. Lawlessness roams the rural, god-fearing landscape of Ohio and West Virginia, inhabitated by the likes of Pollock's deranged-yet-compelling cast of characters--a husband and wife who take vacations to murder hitchhikers, a faux preacher and his crippled accomplice on the lam for manslaughter, and an orphan with a penchant for exacting violent justice. Needless to say, The Devil All the Time is a brutal novel, but Pollock exacts the kind of precision and control over his language that keeps the violence from ever feeling gratuitous. The three storylines eventually converge in a riveting moment that will leave readers floored and haunted. --Kevin Nguyen

About the Author:

Donald Ray Pollock, recipient of the 2009 PEN/Bingham Fellowship, made his literary debut in 2008 with the critically acclaimed short-story collection Knockemstiff. He worked as a labourer at the Mead Paper Mill in Chillicothe, Ohio, from 1973 to 2005. www.donaldraypollock.com

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvill Secker
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1846555418
• ISBN 13: 9781846555411
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 261