The Devil All the Time

 Donald Ray Pollock may not be the most Appalachian of authors, coming from Ohio, but he has written one of the best Appalachian Gothic novels I've read.  

I had been seeing quite a bit of chatter online regarding the film based on the novel, so I decided to look into whether or not there was a book based on it, and discovered, to my delight, that there was.  

Upon first downloading Pollock's book, I got so caught up in the magic of language and story that I tore through my virtual copy in roughly 6 and a half hours.  It was that good.  I couldn't put it down.  I started the night I had downloaded it and finished it the next day after taking a break--hey, a 9th grade English teacher needs her sleep.

Pollock's novel spans a time frame from shortly after World War II up to the late 1960s, but there's nothing hip or cool about his characters.  Upon returning home to Coal Creek, West Virginia, in the hills of Greenbier County, Willard Russell meets the woman of his dreams at a diner in Ohio, and cannot get her out of his mind.  But Willard has a different, slightly bigger problem when he returns home--upon witnessing a particularly gruesome scene of torture during the throes of liberation in the South Pacific, Willard Russel begins to lose his faith in the God and church he grew up in.  When Willard's wife is stricken with cancer, Willard takes his form of religion into his own hands and head, and sets up a makeshift "church" out in the woods, surrounded by crucifixes and a "prayer log."  He enlists the prayers of his son, Arvin, and together they pray as hard and as loud as they can, but it is all in vain as the cancer takes his wife, Charlotte, and Willard's one dream of living a happy and peaceful life.

The story later shifts to that of Lee Bodecker and his sister Sandy, along with her somewhat shiftless ne'er-do-well husband, Carl.  From this point on in the story, their lives are woven together with the narrative thread alongside Arvin Russell, his "sister" Lenora, and a couple of manic mountain preachers who will not only make the reader question their faith in any sort of God, but painfully remind everyone who reads this novel that outward appearances in society are almost never what they actually are in someone's heart. 

Murder, mayhem, sleazeball preachers who are of the most ungodly sort and hints at a homosexual and incestuous relationship are only a smattering of what is in store for fans of Appalachian Gothic fiction, and I believe this piece of literature falls straight into that category.  

The book, by the way, is far superior to the movie, and I loved the movie.  If you're looking for a new piece of literature to lose yourself in and if you have roughly six to eight hours of time to sit still, The Devil All the Time is highly recommended.