The Devil All the Time is about seeing the face of God--two seconds too late. Set in rural Ohio and West Virginia over the span of the mid-1940s to 1960s, Donald Ray Pollock's debut novel (Knockemstiff, his 2008 short story collection, won the 2009 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship) traces the lives of several interconnected characters, all working their ways toward a hot home in hell.
We first meet Arvin Russell--the protagonist in this melée of antagonism--when he watches his father beat another man to a bloody pulp. The novel flows in a gory river from there. Arvin's father, Willard, sacrifices animals in an effort to heal Arvin's dying mother. Carl and Sandy are serial killers who troll the country for hitchhiking "models." Roy is a deluded preacher who eats spiders. The list goes on....
The Devil plays a lead role. He lingers around the corners of every page, while God is vacant--except in moments of death. There's no literal appearance of a horned beast, but Satan's slight touch is regularly evident. "It seems like the Devil don't ever let up," says one character. Not in the world of Don Pollock, he doesn't.
Devil will make you shiver. Pollock murders cats and dogs, and everyone in southern Ohio is homicidal. You may have trouble liking any of the characters. The fascination, though, is in following the lives of these people for several years and seeing how monsters become monsters. --Sara Dobie, blogger at Wordpress