The Devil All the Time

The Novel: The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock is a fascinating book. When the lives of people cross by chance everyone’s fate is changed forever. Taking place in rural West Virginia and Ohio the novel has an exquisite small town feel. The Devil All the Time was written very well. Pollack captured the areas’ accents of the people quite well. His descriptiveness painted a vivid picture in my mind as I read. It was a seemingly easy read for myself, and I enjoyed it wholeheartedly. The novel revolves around a few main characters, or character arcs as I like to call them. One being the Roy and Theodore arc, Willard, Charlotte, and Arvin arc, Arvin and Lenora arc, Arvin and Paster Preston arc, and Sandy and Carl arc. I personally didn’t care much for the more elaborated parts of Roy, Theodore, Sandy, and Carl’s stories. However, some was necessary to make the connection to all of the characters. Willard Russell comes back from the war, stops in Meade, OH, and meets a lovely woman at The Wooden Spoon diner. He orders a meatloaf dinner, and is awestruck by the waitress. However, he never really gets the woman’s name, and heads back to Coal Creek, WV. Willard’s uncle picks him up, and they chit chat on the way home. Emma, Willard’s mother, greets him with open arms. Emma keeps speaking of a woman that Willard should meet named Helen. She prayed to God to bring Willard home and she would see to it that he would marry Helen. However, Willard has other plans, and eyes only for the waitress in Meade. As the story progresses Willard marries Charlotte, and they have a child, Arvin. In my mind these are the central characters, or the ones I best connected with. Sandy and Carl’s arc felt a bit drawn out, as did Roy and Theodore’s. Nonetheless, all the characters felt very real, well fleshed out, some I loved, and many I despised. I do not want to give away many spoilers because the book is fabulous! It definitely needs to be read! To me I would look at it as a type of “what a small world” of circumstances, “like father, like son” in some ways, love, hate, betrayal, and sadness. It really is a novel that captures many aspects of human life. The ups, downs, and the in-between. I have to give The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock five stars out of five stars. It was superbly written, it was entertaining, and relatable. It is possibly the best works of a more historical/general fiction genre that I have read in quite some time. I would recommend this novel to anyone. It really would entertain most readers I believe. That is amazing I think. The movie: The film adaptation of The Devil All the Time released by Netflix in 2020 was not a disappointment! I actually watched the film first, and read the novel second. This did not spoil anything for me. For all of the sticklers, read the novel first because these two are pretty much spot on. I have to say the directing, light, photography, and locations were immaculate, and really gave off the WV and OH feel! Secondly, the casting was perfect, that is not to say that there are 3 characters in the novel that are described very differently. One actor I would not change a thing, and I felt that they enriched the role. Made it a love/hate relationship. Whereas in the novel I hated them straight out. The other two needed to be made to be more disgusting, dirty, slobs, fat, skinny, rotting teeth, and that was my biggest complaint in the casting department. Those two characters were Sandy and Carl. I won’t mention who I wouldn’t change. I feel the actors who portrayed Sandy and Carl were perfect! However, they could have used some makeup to make them a bit more disgusting. I can’t think of any better casting for the rest of the characters. I thought it was done very well. The story was very true to the novel, and very rarely strayed from the content. However, one thing I liked that the film did was meshing the characters arcs together rather than have different parts. This felt more organic, and it flowed very well on the screen. I also liked the fact that the film trimmed a lot of the fat off of Roy, Theodore, Sandy, and Carl’s stories. Nonetheless, kept enough in the film to make everything flow like butter. I absolutely loved the film just as much as the novel. I would say it is probably one of the best adaptations I have seen in recent years! I would highly recommend people to at least check out the movie if you are not readers! With an all star cast, great bones of a story, and Netflix keeps getting better with their films (at least I think so). I give The Devil All the Time Netflix Original five stars out of five. I felt that it did the book justice, the cast was perfect, and filming was beautiful, and the differences from the novel I felt were improvements on some levels. That is quite a task. Nevertheless, check out both the novel and movie today! Or just the movie if you hate to read like my big brother. Until next time, friends.

Story 4.5/5 Narration 5/5 Donald Ray Pollock's The Devil All the Time is a very well-written, gripping story. I loved the atmosphere of this story. Everything was grim and dark. All the characters are very well developed, and the plot is captivating. I loved that we, the readers, follow them through almost all of their tragic lives. There's Willard, who struggles with what's happening to Charlotte, his wife and the love of his life. Meanwhile Arvin, their son, is confronted with the ugliness of life from an early age and this will shape his future. Carl and Sandy Henderson are a couple of serial killers. They live a miserable life, and they die one day after another, without realizing it. They are too immersed in the atrocities they commit. Roy the naïve preacher and his guitarist friend are fleeing the law. All of these characters are the unluckiest no matter where they are or what they are doing. This story is so realistic, I felt like I was with them in it. I was waiting to read how fate, or Donald Ray Pollock, was going to overwhelm them and keep them in a hopeless situation, without it being too much. This book is perfectly balanced, in my opinion. I highly recommend, The Devil All The Time.

I've talked about Donald Ray Pollock before, and even reviewed his first book, a collection of short stories called Knockemstiff. A couple days ago I finished his first novel, The Devil All the Time. I have to say; I'm dumbstruck at this man's writing. Let's get a little history here: He grew up in Knockemstiff, Ohio (yes, that's a real city name, and a terrible place from the sound of things), then lived his adult life in Chillicothe, Ohio, working at a Mead paper plant until he was 50 years old. He enrolled himself, this late in life, into the Creative Writing program at Ohio State, got his first work published, and then `blew up' a little bit because his debut set of stories had a standing-ovation quote on it from Chuck Palahniuk (ahem... you may have heard of him). It always makes me so happy to hear of `underdog' stories like this, or of someone so talented coming out of nowhere and getting to do something creative with their lives after doing manual labor for so long. And the attention he so quickly received was not just hype, but well-deserved realization of a highly talented writer. This book, like his short stories, takes place primarily in 1960's Ohio, which isn't `Southern land,' but it sure as heck has a profoundly dark Southern feel. The landscape is dusty and dry, and you can feel the grungy heat and sweat on every page. It follows an ensemble of characters and carries you through two generations of a family, all the while letting you peek behind the curtains into some seriously depraved character's lives. Pollock has an amazing way of putting you into these scenes because he paints the surroundings so well, and believe me, they'll make you so uncomfortable you can't wait to move on. There are many moments that have the quality of a nightmare, a surreal and terrible circumstance that seems only to escalate deeper into darkness. However, the novel has a very uniform feel because the setting and general attitude of the cast of characters is so richly expressed, even if it's unpleasant. I've tried to rack my brain for a book I've read in which the main characters were so... unlikeable, and I really can't come up with anything. There are really no protagonists here, no morally upright. Everyone is basically despicable and seeking only their own good, no matter the cost, and the ones who are acting out of `love' for another do so with deeply twisted motives. To give you an idea of these folks; a man who sacrifices animals and hangs their carcasses in trees as a blood sacrifice while he wails to the Lord until hoarse that his cancer-plagued wife would be healed, a husband and wife who seduce hitchhikers, then kill them slowly on the side of the road and take photographs of the process, a new preacher who comes to town with the primary intent of sleeping with underage girls in the congregation, and a traveling guitarist/preacher duo that uses shock-tactics like eating spiders while shout-preaching for the sake of making serious cash off of the ignorant townsfolk. The Devil All the Time hits like a hammer, again and again, and there are so many times when you'll finish a chapter and be left thinking, "Oh, man that's messed up..." Why read a book like this, you might ask? Well, you might not want to after what I've said I guess, but despite all the darkness, it really is an amazingly engaging novel. If you can stomach a Tarantino film, particularly one like Pulp Fiction where you can't take your eyes off the characters even though you're not sure exactly why, then you could probably get some decent enjoyment out of this too. The plot is good, if not terribly original, the writing is excellent and the characters, well... they're interesting in their own way. If Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? had zero humor, a lot more swearing, no music and gritty bloodshed, it might look a little like this novel. Good old fashioned Southern-fried, back-woods dark fiction. YUM.

I first read this book in August 2011. Although it is a very dark tale of violence and depravity among rural poor in West Virginia and southeast Ohio, I had remembered it as very well-written and compellingly plotted, with vivid characters who rang true. I do not often re-read books within a decade but decided that I would revisit this one after six years. The novel stood-up well to the second reading and strongly reinforced my earlier impressions. The story centers around Arvin Russel, born in Coal Creek, WV in the 1950s to a recently returned GI and a waitress he’d met in Coal Creek on his bus ride home to Meade, Ohio. Arvin’s earliest vivid memory of his father, Willard, is from a time when he was in the woods with his father and they overheard a couple of hunters making crude sexual comments about Willard’s attractive wife, Charlotte. Initially Willard doesn’t react but later that day he finds the hunters at a local dive and runs one of them alone and beats him senseless. The other runs away. The lesson the incident teaches Arvin is that he should not take guff from anyone but also to carefully choose his moment to respond so that he is at an advantage. Charlotte soon becomes ill with cancer (there’s little money for doctors or medical diagnoses) and Willard tries to save her through animal sacrifices at a “Prayer Log” he has set up in the woods by their rented home. Willard’s efforts traumatize Arvin but fail Charlotte and she dies. Willard slits his own throat at the Prayer Log shortly thereafter. Arvin, orphaned, is sent to live with his grandmother and great uncle in Meade. Along with Arvin’s story, another main plot line follows a low-life couple in Meade, Carl and Sandy Harrison, who go on a multi-state serial murder spree, picking up and killing male hitchhikers. Carl photographs the hitchhikers in sexual encounters with Sandy and then shoots them and takes gruesome photos that he later uses for his personal gratification. There are two or three other related plot lines. Pollock deftly intertwines them, bringing the major characters together in the end. The strength of the novel is in the writing. Pollock skillfully captures the thoughts, emotions, motivations, quirks and peculiarities of the characters. The novel and its people reminded me in many ways of Erskine Caldwell’s Gods Little Acre and Tobacco Road novels, set in rural Georgia a few decades earlier. After reading the novel I felt like I knew the individuals well but also was relieved to be finished with them - at least until Pollock writes a sequel, which Arvin deserves. I’ve read that the novel is being turned into a movie starring James Pattinson, presumably as Arvin. The trick will be in translating the story to film in a reasonably palatable form. Again, the strength of the novel is Pollock’s writing and character development. If the filmmaker cannot evoke sympathy for Arvin and a few others in the story, it may just come across as gratuitously vulgar and violent.

This is one of the best Appalachian crime stories I've read since Daniel Woodrell's "The Winter's Bone," as well as another novel of his, "The Death of Sweet Mister." Fans of Elmore Leonard's "Raylon Givens" stories, in particular the ones that took place in Harlan County, KY, would find this book irresistible. I won't say much more to avoid spoilers, but Pollock did a fantastic job crafting this crime thriller featuring a full cast of unsavory characters, many of them pushed to their limits via poverty. He represented their real-life counterparts well. It read like a true crime novel. I had to take my time with this novel because many chapters jumped from one story to the next, while it all came together in the end. The confluence of all these characters was ultimately tragic and savory, and it was weird to feel both ways at the same time... and it felt SO real. The ending had to end the way it did, and I felt like he tied the story up the best way anyone possibly could. I'll probably revisit this novel in a few years. If I were a university instructor, I'd assign this as required reading to set an example for what great literature looks like and how it's told. The pacing and syntax were flawless.

The book was OK. Had a lot of plot twist.. but it just needed more lining up of the plot.

This book was chosen for the Horror Aficionados Group on Goodreads for the month of May. I really have to thank them, because I don't think I ever would have come across this title on my own. Reading this book made me uncomfortable. It made me squirm. At times the images were nails on a chalkboard and it just made my teeth ache. It wasn't the gore or even the death, it was the way the characters thought and behaved. It was the physical and mental festering. However, I couldn't put it down. I was sucked into the characters and the story. The words flowed and the chapters flew by. It is a mesmerizing read and the author conveys characters with such ease I feel as if I know them intimately, their dreams, how their mind works and their inner demons. It is dark, gritty, and dismal. What I think is brilliant is that every description is grim so as a reader, I never felt like I could escape this world. Even sunshine is not bright and cheery, but muted and oppressive. The entire world is sad. It is a book filled with killers, corruption, people making poor choices and how their stories intersect. Everyone is interesting to me even as I peer into their hopeless lives. I think one thing that draws me to these people is their tenacity. They just keep going, muddling through their days looking for satisfaction. The characters I like are Arvin, his uncle Earskell and his grandmother Emma. Emma and Earskell are good people who don't ask for much and have taken Arvin and another orphan into their home. Arvin has gone through a tough time in his life, traumatic actually, but throughout I feel he still keeps a quality of innocence and is endearing. I was drawn to him and cared about him even when he didn't always make the best choices. There is a some debate on the Goodreads thread whether The Devil All The Time fits into the horror genre. It is also described as Southern Gothic. Some think it's more a psychological thriller and one person even said that it "...defies genres." I have to agree with all of these descriptions. While I wouldn't recommend this book to everyone, I do recommend it as an undeniable powerful story with gripping characters.

Very good book the bock explains what you don’t see or understand from movie