The Devil All the Time
Now a major Netflix film starring Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson
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4.4 • 12 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
In rural Ohio and West Virginia, faith, violence and damage pass from life to life.
NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX FILM STARRING TOM HOLLAND AND ROBERT PATTINSON
In Knockemstiff, Ohio, Willard Russell returns from war carrying damage he cannot leave behind. When his wife Charlotte falls ill, his love turns desperate, then fanatical, until the prayer ground in the woods becomes a place of sacrifice, terror and grief.
His son Arvin is left to grow up in the shadow of that inheritance. Sent to live in Coal Creek, he becomes fiercely protective of Lenora, a lonely, devout girl whose faith makes her vulnerable to men who know how to hide cruelty behind scripture.
Around them move others shaped by the same brutal country: Carl and Sandy Henderson, killers on the highways; Roy, a broken preacher running from an old crime; and men of the law whose respectability is no protection against corruption.
The Devil All the Time is a dark American literary crime novel set in post-war rural Ohio and West Virginia. Donald Ray Pollock binds its separate lives into one grim inheritance, where religious obsession, family loyalty and violence drive Arvin towards a reckoning he cannot avoid.
'Superb' The Times
'Terrifying ... an unsettling masterwork' GQ
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
