The Devil All the Time

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