Review: The Devil All the Time

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of 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.

Bleak does not begin to describe this book. Full of awful people doing despicable things to each other this book destroys the usual cutesy, American dream, we are so used to seeing in book set in this era. I would say that with the exception of Arvin and one or two other minor characters there is not one single person in the whole book with a redeeming quality. This book is vicious and unrelenting in its violence and setting with crimes being committed with the casualness of ordering coffee. I loved it by the way...

That's not all it is though. there's small town desperation and the frustration of being "stuck". There's the grim smallness of absent ambition. Best illustrated by the character who feels eating a hot dog at a baseball stadium would be life changing.

Now I suppose we need to talk about the darkness, the murder, the animal sacrifice, the rape, the suicide, the prostitution, the sheer awfulness of people. Like I said this book is bleak, real bleak, and desperate. There are no excuses presented for the character's actions beyond the terrible grimness of crappy lives and desperation.

But that's The Devil all the Time, grim desperation occasionally illuminated by fleeting acts of kindness.

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