Review by New York Times Review
The characters in Donald Ray Pollock's first novel march in a parade of betrayals, sacrifices, suicides, rapes and executions. FROM the opening sentences of Donald Ray Pollock's violence-soaked first novel, "The Devil All the Time," it's clear that blood will out. The West Virginia and southern Ohio landscapes of this book seem riven by one long, coal-smeared and hell-harrowed gash in the earth, and the stories that vent from it file past in a crimson procession of evils so brutally creative, and so exactingly and lovingly detailed by Pollock, that over the course of the novel it becomes unclear whether they've been spawned for the purposes of plot or purely for atavistic pleasure. The story begins with the return of a veteran, Willard Russell, from the Pacific island abattoir of World War II, where he has seen a fellow soldier skinned and crucified alive. He carries this vision home, but as the novel proceeds and the lives of Willard's mother, his uncle and especially his son carry forward, the Russell clan is beset on all sides by nightmares the equal of anything Willard experienced in combat. Flannery O'Connor called Southern writing "Christ-haunted," and though Pollock is strictly speaking a Midwesterner - his 2008 story collection, "Knockemstiff," was set in the same Ohio town where he grew up, and where some of this novel also takes place - there's more than a little of O'Connor's Southern grotesque in his work. Certainly the vision of Christ crucified, and the accompanying notion that redemption is accessible only through agony, hangs gore-spattered above Pollock's characters. There are pictures of the Crucifixion in almost every room of the Russell home, and as his wife wastes from cancer, Willard builds more crosses behind the house, festooning them with animal sacrifices and bathing the ground about with human blood. In other strands of the narrative, a guitar-playing gay pedophile is maimed from drinking poison to test his faith, while his friend and fellow huckster locks himself in a closet to speak with God and on Sundays drenches himself in spiders to prove his own trust in the Lord. Another character, a serial killer who takes road trips with her husband to build his torture-porn photo collection, worries for the souls of the hitchhikers she helps to murder. And a sexually predacious and dandified preacher believes he still has a chance of going to heaven if only he repents of his awful deeds in the moments before he takes his last breath. Pollock's prose is as sickly beautiful as it is hard-boiled. His scenes have a rare and unsettling ability to make the reader woozy, the ends of the chapters flicking like black horseflies off the page. "He wondered if he would ever feel clean again," one character thinks in a hotel room, after shooting two people he's just met. "Every once in a while, someone in the next room coughed, and the sound made him think of the woman choking on her blood. He was still thinking of her when morning came." And if the characters feel themselves to be Christ-haunted, there's also a sense that the tenacious sway of the landscape itself is vying for their souls. No matter how they attempt to find release from their own lives, through travel, murder or prayer, they seem unable to slip free of the viney pull of poverty, depravity and desperation. Knockemstiff, Meade, Topperville, the dump on Reub Hill Road: each of these places courses through the blood of the characters even as it becomes a catch basin for that blood. It's tempting to say that Pollock has set loose a crew of grotesques - but grotesques, for all their twisted absurdities, are still capable of arousing sympathy amid revulsion, and "The Devil All the Time" is a darker book than that. Pollock seems vigilant against acts of grace; whenever any flicker of light appears, he pinches it out with grim purpose. As the parade of betrayals, sacrifices, suicides, rapes and executions trundles by, we find ourselves going numb with the horror of it all, saturated with violence and caring less and less what happens to the perpetrators that are its main concern. At most these monsters feel only the slightest trace of inner conflict for their deeds, the briefest twinges of regret for the sufferings they dispense. In fact, as we read, we start to feel as if we are simply riffling through the grisly snapshots that Pollock's serial killers take of their victims. As in the photos, it's too late for any of these characters to be saved, and so, as all of them are swept toward their inevitable ends, it seems less and less important whether they catch hold of repentance or find peace of any kind. This is a nightmare, after all, and all we can hope for from nightmares is to wake at the end. THERE are instances when we are arrested by a small act of kindness, and a few characters do appeal to our empathy as they wade through the rivers of gore. We share one character's sorrow when someone she loves commits suicide, and the most likable character in the book, Willard's Uncle Earskell, is the most likable because of his quiet determination and acceptance of life as it eddies around him. Finally, Arvin Eugene Russell - Willard's son, who forms the quiet, brooding center of these intertwining tales - gives us a faint glimmer of the possibility that a living, day-to-day redemption may exist despite all evidence to the contrary. Mostly, however, we find ourselves surveying Pollock's cabinet of grisly creations and wondering what, besides suffering, is their purpose. Sometimes it seems very much as if, in the words of the book's crooked deputy sheriff, "some people were born just so they could be buried." Pollock knows how to dunk readers into a scene and when to pull them out gasping, and the muscular current of each plot line exerts a continuous pull toward the engulfing falls. Important as well, and welcome, is the native intelligence he grants each of his characters. While many of them may be backwoods, none are backwards; and almost all are rich with a fatalistic humor that is often their sole redeeming feature. "It's hard to live a good life," one unscrupulous character opines. "It seems like the Devil don't ever let up." Unluckily for him and all the other inhabitants of "The Devil All the Time," however, the only deity paying attention is Donald Ray Pollock, who is as unpredictable in his mercy as Christ crucified and as creatively depraved as any Satan summoned up by late-night radio preachers. As in our own lives we are constantly drawn to beg for some reason, some higher purpose that will explain it all - but in the end, "The Devil All the Time" offers up its characters only as sacrifices. To what, or for what, we, and perhaps Pollock himself, are never quite sure. A serial killer who travels with her husband worries for the souls of the hitchhikers she helps to murder. Josh Ritter is the author of the novel "Bright's Passage" and a singer-songwriter whose most recent album is "So Runs the World Away."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
An improbably connected network of criminals and degenerates constitutes the cast of this dark novel, loosely centered on the young Arvin Russell. Arvin's father is the first of many sad and disturbing characters. A scarred veteran, he becomes completely unhinged when his wife gets cancer and draws his son into a mad, pagan world of endless prayers and sacrifices. Soon an orphan, Arvin moves from Ohio to his father's native West Virginia. Further misfits turn up in both those places as Arvin grows up and struggles with his own violent impulses. There is the crooked sheriff, whose sister happens to be one-half of a serial-killing duo; the nutty, accidentally murderous preacher and his goading, debauched cousin; the pedophile; the cuckold. This is an almost too sordid landscape, with levels of dysfunction and criminality all but absurd. But Pollock earns comparison to Flannery O'Connor, not just through a similar presence of ominous religiosity, small-town depravity, and murder-in-the-woods but also in the laden atmosphere and significance extracted from what might be just melodrama.--Kinney, Me. Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
If Pollack'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 shop. 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, possibly 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." Pollack 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. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This debut novel occasionally flashes the promise that the author showed in his highly praised short-story collection, but falls short of fulfilling it.The unflinching, often hilarious stories in Knockemstiff (2008) drew considerable attention to a writer whose own story was as fascinating as his fiction. A mill worker for three decades in blue-collar Ohio (where he sets his fiction), Pollock belatedly earned an MFA from Ohio State and published his collection of stories in which themes and characters were so interwoven that it might have passed as a novel. It was inevitable that his next book would be an actual novel, and billed as such, but this isn't the total knockout that one might have expected. Instead, its various plot strands, which inevitably come together at the end, might have worked better as individual stories. Set again in rural, impoverished Knockemstiff and nearby Mead, the novel opens with the relationship of young Arvin Russell and his father, Willard, a haunted World War II vet who marries a beautiful woman and then watches her die from cancer. He alternates between praying and drinking, neither of which do much to alleviate his pain. In fact, his son "didn't know which was worse, the drinking or the praying." The tragic ways of the world (in a novel that sometimes aims at dark comedy) leave Arvin an orphan. As he's maturing into young adulthood, raised by his grandmother, the plot shifts include a huckster pair of religious revivalists, a preacher who preys on young girls and a husband-and-wife pair of serial killers (she seduces their victims, whom they call "models," and he photographs and kills them). Though there's a hard-bitten realism to the character of Arvin, most of the rest seem like gothic noir redneck caricature (some with latent homosexual tendencies).A piece of cheap motel wall art could stand as the aesthetic credo: "It served no purpose that he could think of, other than to remind a person that the world was a sorry-ass place to be stuck living in."Pollock remains a singular stylist, but he has better books in him than this.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
