The Devil All the Time

Author(s): Donald Ray Pollock

Fiction

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.


Product Information

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

General Fields

  • : 9780099563389
  • : Penguin Random House
  • : Arrow
  • : September 2012
  • : January 2013
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Donald Ray Pollock
  • : Paperback