It has been a little while since the last full book review so please, be gentle with your reading and commenting!
Book Review 2011-007
The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
2011 by Doubleday 304 pages
I loved just but everything about Pollock's short story collection, Knockemstiff, published three years ago. It fit right into my wheelhouse--dark, great writing, humor (albeit, dark), a bit of a body count, a great sense of place and more. The Devil All the Time follows his story collection nicely. Set in similar territory, very rural SE Ohio and West Virginia, the novel follows three sets of people whose lives do converge and rarely in an pleasant circumstances.
Pollock gives us Willard Russell, who returns from seeing things during World War II that have him coming back as a changed man, one still spiritual, but not prone to church visits, a drinking man, a pretty hard man. On his return home he stops at a diner and falls head over heels for the waitress, leaving her what readers will assume at that time was an unheard of tip of a dollar. The waitresses name was Charlotte and Willard comes back for her after a short time of being home with his mother and Uncle. Their son , very young when he first appears plays a strong roll throughout as well.
While Willard is first back at home, before going back for Charlotte, his mother tried nudging him toward a spinsterish, religious woman named Helen. She eventually ends up with a Preacher named Roy. He had been brought to their small town church with Theodore, his crippled, guitar playing brother. The two of them went to extremes to find direction from above--Theodore's affliction was caused by drinking poison, Roy was a snake handler--means that were to impress the congregations they spoke in front of.
The other main pair in the novel are a pair of serial killers--Carl and Sandy Henderson--their annual vacation is two weeks or so driving out of state, picking up hitchhikers and photographing them in compromising positions with Sandy both before and after Carl has killed them. They use the contents of the wallets of these young men to further their travels.
I'm slipping dangerously close to having this be a long review that is nothing but plot summary and to do Pollock's work justice, I'd need more than the 304 pages he filled. His writing is very economical and the situations he pushes his characters in and out of demand the reader continue on--once you get more than a chapter or two into this novel, Pollock's style will lead you right through on to the end. There's a way that he ends each fairly short section, a way of closing something a page before and then starting something new to end the chapter that had me turning the pages.
Pollock, between the preaching brothers, and Willard and the "church" he creates/builds out in the woods behind his home, infuses the novel with religion or maybe better stated, a spirituality--which creates a more than interesting mix with the violence, the sex, and other outright oddities that Pollock brings to this rural world.
While there may have been one or two scenes that the reader scopes out before they occur, Pollock doesn't stretch credulity too much with the paths that get the various sets of people to interact with each other. And again, the pacing Pollock pushes his characters through is just about perfect. If you don't mind dark material, The Devil All the Time is a great read for you.
4 stars.
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