Donald Ray Pollock

I wasn’t expecting much, to be honest, but came out delightfully surprised and pleasantly disturbed. The Devil All the Time is the sort of book that leaves a bad taste in your mouth. One that, once gone, strangely makes you wonder if that taste was so bad after all while sparking a perverse craving for more.

Pollock fleshed out this tale with all the familiar tropes of Southern Gothic and weaved it seamlessly with the dank feeling of noir hopelessness. Instead of endless rain and neon lights in a city that never sleeps, Pollock gave us sweatboxes and crummy diners and backwater communities where solitude is often the best option. Instead of hardboiled, grisly detectives and reluctant heroes, he gave us a complex web of murderers, whores and irredeemable priests, all spreading their own wicked sickness across the people they touch.

That’s where The Devil All the Time’s best attempt at a sympathetic character comes into it. Arvin Eugene Russell isn’t as shockingly repugnant as the rest of the leading cast, but he’s no saintly hero, either. The presence of the other leads creates a vortex of chaos and questionable decisions around a young man who would have otherwise lived a troubled but unremarkable life.

While it hardly keeps you guessing, and I did find the convergence of the four character threads to be entirely predictable, it’s the brutal shock factor of the small moments that really pulls you in as a reader. The story becomes about the flashes of memories that shaped these deplorable, sin-ridden characters and the journey that brings them to their calamitous end.

After all, despite the resolution, Pollock closes the novel in a way that leaves you questioning if such vicious cycles can really be so easily broken.

I started out reading the ebook, but due to life and the obsessive need to know how it ended, I switched to the audiobook. That was a great choice, as I found the narration performance really helped to drag me down into the sweat-stained, dank world that Pollock created.

One point that did grind on my nerves was the gratuitous use of ‘said’. Maybe it was because of the narration, or maybe (and most likely) it was just overused.

This, of course, falls more on the editor than the writer. But when a good 90% of any dialogue is just ‘said’, it quickly becomes redundant. Especially when the narrator did a fantastic job with character voices and tones, spitting words out and snarling curses, only to then have the text end with ‘Carl said’.

It’s small nit-picking, I know, but it was enough that one could play a drinking game with the repetitive word and end up pretty tanked by the end.

Still, after finishing (and loving) the book, I’m pretty apprehensive over the upcoming movie. It’s going to be a tough job to portray the level of depravity and really get into the gritty, repulsive hearts of a lot of the characters. Even with an R rating, how is a movie going to show the extent of Teagardin’s sexual distortions of sin and the bible, and the magnitude of what he’s done to his young wife? Will they faithfully show us what Sandy will do for $20, or the way Carl and her unhealthy addictions began? Will the production ‘Powers That Be’ allow the prayer log set to be the shockingly grotesque reflection of a troubled mind, as so vividly and well described in the book?

I guess only time will tell. Thankfully there’s not long to wait now. I am, however, looking forward to all the die-hard MCU and DCEU fans barrelling headfirst into this without knowing what to expect. I get the feeling the internet will be an interesting place for a few days after this release.

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This is rather disturbing book on multiple levels. I have a feeling that without rural US nobody would be able to write horror stories. It needs to be Appalachian "eyes from the forest" type of story because, hey, it is setting - right?

Story on its own is pretty good written, we follow several story-lines that (at first) slowly (then in ever faster pace) converge to rather satisfying conclusion. This is not horror in terms of supernatural but horror caused by human nature. Also book will goes into annals on my end as a book with most terrifyingly vivid depictions of cancer patients.

Book is rather free with some of the elements - incest, sex, sex, blood, blood - and while some of them are understandable (i.e. new preacher and homicidal couple) others are there just for shock and awe effect (i.e. I am still trying to figure out the role of the altar as anything besides scene setup for final showdown). Apparently nobody is doing anything in the farm country than incest, weird religious practices and in general nailing everything that moves (and here it seems they all aim for even younger girls and boys and sex slaves/selling spouses are very common - I think that farmers and miners would have a comment on this but lets leave it as it is). Unrelated to this specific novel, all of this them-incestual-hicks approach while interesting at first becomes very tiring after a while (enough maniacs live in urban areas, you do not need to go outside the cities). In any case this is the central view of rural society in this story; I think that small town horror can be depicted in other ways but OK, I guess sometimes cliche's are required for the shock value.

Author's style is excellent and you will be glued to the pages to the very end. Conversations between and behavior of the characters flow so naturally I could not find any major inconsistency (even events relevant to story progress are very very natural, there is no illogical developments, which one could expect considering story spans decades). Author is truly master when it comes to words and I think that more subtle approach (without shock and awe technique) would suit him more.

All in all very interesting crime noir novel where no-one is spared and you are left wondering what next. I wont go into details because I dont think it can be done without spoiling the novel and that would be true crime. Lets say book "suffers" from what I call "6th sense syndrome" - you will need to have very large time period before re-reading because everything will be very alive in your memory when you read it first time.

Highly recommended and I have to admit I am on a lookout for more works from this author.… (more)