With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain. 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.ĭonald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved.

There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. Its plot follows disparate characters in. He dropped out of high school at seventeen to work in a meatpacking plant, and then spent thirty-two years employed in a paper mill in Chillicothe, Ohio. Its plot follows desperate characters in. The Devil All the Time is the debut novel by American writer Donald Ray Pollock, published in 2011 by Doubleday. Donald Ray Pollock was born in 1954 and grew up in southern Ohio, in a holler named Knockemstiff. Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. The Devil All the Time is the debut novel by American writer Donald Ray Pollock, published in 2011 by Doubleday. In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic overtones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting. Now a Netflix film starring Tom Holland and Robert PattinsonĪ dark and riveting vision of 1960s America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree. This debut novel occasionally flashes the promise that the author showed in his highly praised short-story collection, but falls short of fulfilling it.

A devil all the time book