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Title details for The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock - Available

The Devil All the Time

by Donald Ray Pollock
Mark Bramhall
Audiobook
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1 of 1 copy available

Now a Netflix film starring Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson
A dark and riveting vision of 1960s America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree. 
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.
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. 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. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. 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.
Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    July 12, 2011

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780307941374
      • File size: 264453 KB
      • Duration: 09:10:56

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      It isn't just the poverty in rural Ohio and West Virginia that brings out the violent undertones in this book's protagonists--it's the history, the sadness, and the sense of duty and right. Whatever the cause, it falls to Arvin Russell, orphaned yet moral son of Appalachia, to at least try to set things right. Mark Bramhall captures every bit of the story's pervasive sorrow and hopelessness in his slow pacing and understated tone. While he takes the dialect a bit far at times, he also conveys the inner desperation of a female serial killer, her corrupt lawman brother, and some of their victims. As the final killing ends, we are left with a sense of justice, and despair. R.L.L. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 2, 2011
      If Pollock'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 madâsacrificing animals and worse at his altar in the woodsâand 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." Pollock 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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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