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Donald Ray Pollock

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The Devil All the Time Paperback – July 10, 2012

by Donald Ray Pollock (Author)

4.5 4,772 ratings

Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction

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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.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Anchor
Publication date

July 10, 2012
Dimensions

5.15 x 0.93 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

9780307744869
ISBN-13

978-0307744869
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Brutally creative. . . . Pollock knows how to dunk readers into a scene and when to pull them out gasping."--The New York Times Book Review

“Fulfills the promise in [Knockemstiff]. . . . Invites comparisons to Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver.” –USA Today

"Finely woven. . . . [A] throat-stomping Appalachian crime story." –GQ

“For fans of No Country for Old Men . . . sure to give you goose bumps.” —Details

"Should cement Pollock's reputation as a significant voice in American fiction." —Los Angeles Times

"Will have you on the edge of your seat." —Christian Science Monitor

“A systematic cataloguing of the horror and hypocrisy that festers in the dark shadow of the American dream.” —The Portland Mercury

“You may be repelled, you may be shocked, you will almost certainly be horrified, but you will read every last word.” —The Washington Post

“Disarmingly smooth prose startled by knife-twists of black humor. . . . Expertly employs the conventions of Southern Gothic horror.”— The Wall Street Journal

"Reads as if the love child of O'Connor and Faulkner was captured by Cormac McCarthy, kept in a cage out back and forced to consume nothing but onion rings, Oxycontin and Terrence Malick's Badlands."--The Oregonian

"[Pollock] doesn't get a word wrong in this super-edgy American Gothic stunner."--Elle

"Features a bleak and often nightmarish vision of the decades following World War II, a world where redemption, on the rare occasions when it does come to town, rides shotgun with soul-scarring consequences."--The Onion, A.V. Club

"Mr. Pollock's new novel is, if anything, even darker than the Knockemstiff, and its violence and religious preoccupations venture into Flannery O'Connor territory."--The New York Times

“Donald Ray Pollock’s engaging and proudly violent first novel…suggests a new category of fiction—grindhouse literary. Subtle characterization: check. Well-crafted sentences: check. Enthusiastic amounts of murder and mayhem: check, check.”—The Daily Beast

"Beneath the gothic horror is an Old Testament sense of a moral order in the universe, even if the restoration of that order itself requires violence."--The Columbus Dispatch

"A smorgasbord of grotesque characters trapped in a pressure-cooker plot. . . . Brutal fun."--Esquire

"For a first novel so soaked in stale sweat and bright fresh blood, Pollock's sweat is well-earned, and his blood is wise."--Philadelphia Citypaper

"A gallery of reprobates and religious fanatics... are multidimensional, flawed human beings."--Dayton Daily News

"[The Devil All the Time is] a world unto its own, a world vividly and powerfully brought to life by a literary stylist who packs a punch as deadly as pulp-fiction master Jim Thompson and as evocative and morally rigorous as Russell Banks."—Philadelphia Inquirer

“Stunning . . . . One wild story . . . gives us sex, murder, mayhem and some of the most bizarre characters in fiction today.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch

About the Author

DONALD RAY POLLOCK is the author of the novel The Devil All the Time and the story collection Knockemstiff, recipient of the 2009 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Fellowship. He worked as a laborer at the Mead Paper Mill in Chillicothe, Ohio, from 1973 to 2005. He holds an MFA from Ohio State University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

It was a Wednesday afternoon in the fall of 1945, not long after the war had ended. The Greyhound made its regular stop in Meade, Ohio, a little paper-mill town an hour south of Columbus that smelled like rotten eggs. Strangers complained about the stench, but the locals liked to brag that it was the sweet smell of money. The bus driver, a soft, sawed-off man who wore elevated shoes and a limp bow tie, pulled in the alley beside the depot and announced a forty-minute break. He wished he could have a cup of coffee, but his ulcer was acting up again. He yawned and took a swig from a bottle of pink medicine he kept on the dashboard. The smokestack across town, by far the tallest structure in this part of the state, belched forth another dirty brown cloud. You could see it for miles, puffing like a volcano about to blow its skinny top.

Leaning back in his seat, the bus driver pulled his leather cap down over his eyes. He lived right outside of Philadelphia, and he thought that if he ever had to live in a place like Meade, Ohio, he'd go ahead and shoot himself. You couldn't even find a bowl of lettuce in this town. All that people seemed to eat here was grease and more grease. He'd be dead in two months eating the slop they did. His wife told her friends that he was delicate, but there was something about the tone of her voice that sometimes made him wonder if she was really being sympathetic. If it hadn't been for the ulcer, he would have gone off to fight with the rest of the men. He'd have slaughtered a whole platoon of Germans and shown her just how goddamn delicate he was. The biggest regret was all the medals he'd missed out on. His old man once got a certificate from the railroad for not missing a single day of work in twenty years, and had pointed it out to his sickly son every time he'd seen him for the next twenty. When the old man finally croaked, the bus driver tried to talk his mother into sticking the certificate in the casket with the body so he wouldn't have to look at it anymore. But she insisted on leaving it displayed in the living room as an example of what a person could attain in this life if he didn't let a little indigestion get in his way. The funeral, an event the bus driver had looked forward to for a long time, had nearly been ruined by all the arguing over that crummy scrap of paper. He would be glad when all the discharged soldiers finally reached their destinations so he wouldn't have to look at the dumb bastards anymore. It wore on you after a while, other people's accomplishments.

Private Willard Russell had been drinking in the back of the bus with two sailors from Georgia, but one had passed out and the other had puked in their last jug. He kept thinking that if he ever got home, he'd never leave Coal Creek, West Virginia, again. He'd seen some hard things growing up in the hills, but they didn't hold a candle to what he'd witnessed in the South Pacific. On one of the Solomons, he and a couple of other men from his outfit had run across a marine skinned alive by the Japanese and nailed to a cross made out of two palm trees. The raw, bloody body was covered with black flies. They could still see the man's heart beating in his chest. His dog tags were hanging from what remained of one of his big toes: Gunnery Sergeant Miller Jones. Unable to offer anything but a little mercy, Willard shot the marine behind the ear, and they took him down and covered him with rocks at the foot of the cross. The inside of Willard's head hadn't been the same since.

When he heard the tubby bus driver yell something about a break, Willard stood up and started toward the door, disgusted with the two sailors. In his opinion, the navy was one branch of the military that should never be allowed to drink. In the three years he'd served in the army, he hadn't met a single swabby who could hold his liquor. Someone had told him that it was because of the saltpeter they were fed to keep them from going crazy and fucking each other when they were out to sea. He wandered outside the bus depot and saw a little restaurant across the street called the Wooden Spoon. There was a piece of white cardboard stuck in the window advertising a meat loaf special for thirty-five cents. His mother had fixed him a meat loaf the day before he left for the army, and he considered that a good sign. In a booth by the window, he sat down and lit a cigarette. A shelf ran around the room, lined with old bottles and antique kitchenware and cracked black-and-white photographs for the dust to collect on. Tacked to the wall by the booth was a faded newspaper account of a Meade police officer who'd been gunned down by a bank robber in front of the bus depot. Willard looked closer, saw that it was dated February 11, 1936. That would have been four days before his twelfth birthday, he calculated. An old man, the only other customer in the diner, was bent over at a table in the middle of the room slurping a bowl of green soup. His false teeth rested on top of a stick of butter in front of him.

Willard finished the cigarette and was just getting ready to leave when a dark-haired waitress finally stepped out of the kitchen. She grabbed a menu from a stack by the cash register and handed it to him. "I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't hear you come in." Looking at her high cheekbones and full lips and long, slender legs, Willard discovered, when she asked him what he wanted to eat, that the spit had dried in his mouth. He could barely speak. That had never happened to him before, not even in the middle of the worst fighting on Bougainville. While she went to put the order in and get him a cup of coffee, the thought went through his head that just a couple of months ago he was certain that his life was going to end on some steamy, worthless rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; and now here he was, still sucking air and just a few hours from home, being waited on by a woman who looked like a live version of one of those pinup movie angels. As best as Willard could ever tell, that was when he fell in love. It didn't matter that the meat loaf was dry and the green beans were mushy and the roll as hard as a lump of #5 coal. As far as he was concerned, she served him the best meal he ever had in his life. And after he finished it, he got back on the bus without even knowing Charlotte Willoughby's name.

Across the river in Huntington, he found a liquor store when the bus made another stop, and bought five pints of bonded whiskey that he stuck away in his pack. He sat in the front now, right behind the driver, thinking about the girl in the diner and looking for some indication that he was getting close to home. He was still a little drunk. Out of the blue, the bus driver said, "Bringing any medals back?" He glanced at Willard in the rearview mirror.

Willard shook his head. "Just this skinny old carcass I'm walking around in."

"I wanted to go, but they wouldn't take me."

"You're lucky," Willard said. The day they'd come across the marine, the fighting on the island was nearly over, and the sergeant had sent them out looking for some water fit to drink. A couple of hours after they buried Miller Jones's flayed body, four starving Japanese soldiers with fresh bloodstains on their machetes came out of the rocks with their hands up in the air and surrendered. When Willard and his two buddies started to lead them back to the location of the cross, the soldiers dropped to their knees and started begging or apologizing, he didn't know which. "They tried to escape," Willard lied to the sergeant later in the camp. "We didn't have no choice." After they had executed the Japs, one of the men with him, a Louisiana boy who wore a swamp rat's foot around his neck to ward off slant-eyed bullets, cut their ears off with a straight razor. He had a cigar box full of ones he'd already dried. His plan was to sell the trophies for five bucks apiece once they got back to civilization.

"I got an ulcer," the bus driver said.

"You didn't miss nothing."

"I don't know," the bus driver said. "I sure would have liked to got me a medal. Maybe a couple of them. I figure I could have killed enough of those Kraut bastards for two anyway. I'm pretty quick with my hands."

Looking at the back of the bus driver's head, Willard thought about the conversation he'd had with the gloomy young priest on board the ship after he confessed that he'd shot the marine to put him out of his misery. The priest was sick of all the death he'd seen, all the prayers he'd said over rows of dead soldiers and piles of body parts. He told Willard that if even half of history was true, then the only thing this depraved and corrupt world was good for was preparing you for the next. "Did you know," Willard said to the driver, "that the Romans used to gut donkeys and sew Christians up alive inside the carcasses and leave them out in the sun to rot?" The priest had been full of such stories.

"What the hell's that got to do with a medal?"

"Just think about it. You're trussed up like a turkey in a pan with just your head sticking out a dead donkey's ass; and then the maggots eating away at you until you see the glory."

The bus driver frowned, gripped the steering wheel a little tighter. "Friend, I don't see what you're getting at. I was talking about coming home with a big medal pinned to your chest. Did these Roman fellers give out medals to them people before they stuck 'em in the donkeys? Is that what you mean?"

Willard didn't know what he meant. According to the priest, only God could figure out the ways of men. He licked his dry lips, thought about the whiskey in his pack. "What I'm saying is that when it comes right down to it, everybody suffers in the end," Willard said.

"Well," the bus driver said, "I'd liked to have my medal before then. Heck, I got a wife at home who goes nuts every time she sees one. Talk about suffering. I worry myself sick anytime I'm out on the road she's gonna take off with a purple heart."

Willard leaned forward and the driver felt the soldier's hot breath on the back of his fat neck, smelled the whiskey fumes and the stale traces of a cheap lunch. "You think Miller Jones would give a shit if his old lady was out fucking around on him?" Willard said. "Buddy, he'd trade places with you any goddamn day."

"Who the hell is Miller Jones?"

Willard looked out the window as the hazy top of Greenbrier Mountain started to appear in the distance. His hands were trembling, his brow shiny with sweat. "Just some poor bastard who went and fought in that war they cheated you out of, that's all."

Willard was just getting ready to break down and crack open one of the pints when his uncle Earskell pulled up in his rattly Ford in front of the Greyhound station in Lewisburg at the corner of Washington and Court. He had been sitting on a bench outside for almost three hours, nursing a cold coffee in a paper cup and watching people walk by the Pioneer Drugstore. He was ashamed of the way he'd talked to the bus driver, sorry that he'd brought up the marine's name like he did; and he vowed that, though he would never forget him, he'd never mention Gunnery Sergeant Miller Jones to anyone again. Once they were on the road, he reached into his duffel and handed Earskell one of the pints along with a German Luger. He'd traded a Japanese ceremonial sword for the pistol at the base in Maryland right before he got discharged. "That's supposed to be the gun Hitler used to blow his brains out," Willard said, trying to hold back a grin.

"Bullshit," Earskell said.

Willard laughed. "What? You think the guy lied to me?"

"Ha!" the old man said. He twisted the cap off the bottle, took a long pull, then shuddered. "Lord, this is good stuff."

"Drink up. I got three more in my kit." Willard opened another pint and lit a cigarette. He stuck his arm out the window. "How's my mother doing?"

"Well, I gotta say, when they sent Junior Carver's body back, she went a little off in the head there for a while. But she seems pretty good now." Earskell took another hit off the pint and set it between his legs. "She just been worried about you, that's all."

They climbed slowly into the hills toward Coal Creek. Earskell wanted to hear some war stories, but the only thing his nephew talked about for the next hour was some woman he'd met in Ohio. It was the most he'd ever heard Willard talk in his life. He wanted to ask if it was true that the Japs ate their own dead, like the newspaper said, but he figured that could wait. Besides, he needed to pay attention to his driving. The whiskey was going down awful smooth, and his eyes weren't as good as they used to be. Emma had been waiting on her son to return home for a long time, and it would be a shame if he wrecked and killed them both before she got to see him. Earskell chuckled a little to himself at the thought of that. His sister was one of the most God-fearing people he'd ever met, but she'd follow him straight into hell to make him pay for that one.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0307744868
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor; Reprint edition (July 10, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780307744869
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307744869
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 11.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.15 x 0.93 x 8 inches

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Donald Ray Pollock

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Donald Ray Pollock grew up in Knockemstiff, Ohio, and quit high school at seventeeen to work in a meatpacking plant. He then spent thirty-two years employed as a laborer at the Mead Paper Corporation in Chillicothe, Ohio, before enrolling in the MFA program at Ohio State University. His first book, a collection of stories called Knockemstiff, won the 2009 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship. This was followed by a novel, The Devil All The Time, which was listed as one of the top ten books of 2011 by Publisher's Weekly. His third book, a novel called The Heavenly Table, is forthcoming from Doubleday in July, 2016. Though pretty much a Luddite when it comes to computer stuff, he is now on Facebook (facebook.com/DonaldRayPollock) and also has a website at www.donaldraypollock.net.

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Negan 88

Novel and Film Comparison Review

Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2021

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The Novel:
The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock is a fascinating book. When the lives of people cross by chance everyone’s fate is changed forever. Taking place in rural West Virginia and Ohio the novel has an exquisite small town feel.

The Devil All the Time was written very well. Pollack captured the areas’ accents of the people quite well. His descriptiveness painted a vivid picture in my mind as I read. It was a seemingly easy read for myself, and I enjoyed it wholeheartedly.

The novel revolves around a few main characters, or character arcs as I like to call them. One being the Roy and Theodore arc, Willard, Charlotte, and Arvin arc, Arvin and Lenora arc, Arvin and Paster Preston arc, and Sandy and Carl arc. I personally didn’t care much for the more elaborated parts of Roy, Theodore, Sandy, and Carl’s stories. However, some was necessary to make the connection to all of the characters.

Willard Russell comes back from the war, stops in Meade, OH, and meets a lovely woman at The Wooden Spoon diner. He orders a meatloaf dinner, and is awestruck by the waitress. However, he never really gets the woman’s name, and heads back to Coal Creek, WV.

Willard’s uncle picks him up, and they chit chat on the way home. Emma, Willard’s mother, greets him with open arms. Emma keeps speaking of a woman that Willard should meet named Helen. She prayed to God to bring Willard home and she would see to it that he would marry Helen. However, Willard has other plans, and eyes only for the waitress in Meade.

As the story progresses Willard marries Charlotte, and they have a child, Arvin. In my mind these are the central characters, or the ones I best connected with. Sandy and Carl’s arc felt a bit drawn out, as did Roy and Theodore’s. Nonetheless, all the characters felt very real, well fleshed out, some I loved, and many I despised.

I do not want to give away many spoilers because the book is fabulous! It definitely needs to be read! To me I would look at it as a type of “what a small world” of circumstances, “like father, like son” in some ways, love, hate, betrayal, and sadness. It really is a novel that captures many aspects of human life. The ups, downs, and the in-between.

I have to give The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock five stars out of five stars. It was superbly written, it was entertaining, and relatable. It is possibly the best works of a more historical/general fiction genre that I have read in quite some time. I would recommend this novel to anyone. It really would entertain most readers I believe. That is amazing I think.

The movie:
The film adaptation of The Devil All the Time released by Netflix in 2020 was not a disappointment! I actually watched the film first, and read the novel second. This did not spoil anything for me. For all of the sticklers, read the novel first because these two are pretty much spot on.

I have to say the directing, light, photography, and locations were immaculate, and really gave off the WV and OH feel! Secondly, the casting was perfect, that is not to say that there are 3 characters in the novel that are described very differently. One actor I would not change a thing, and I felt that they enriched the role. Made it a love/hate relationship. Whereas in the novel I hated them straight out. The other two needed to be made to be more disgusting, dirty, slobs, fat, skinny, rotting teeth, and that was my biggest complaint in the casting department. Those two characters were Sandy and Carl. I won’t mention who I wouldn’t change. I feel the actors who portrayed Sandy and Carl were perfect! However, they could have used some makeup to make them a bit more disgusting.

I can’t think of any better casting for the rest of the characters. I thought it was done very well. The story was very true to the novel, and very rarely strayed from the content. However, one thing I liked that the film did was meshing the characters arcs together rather than have different parts. This felt more organic, and it flowed very well on the screen. I also liked the fact that the film trimmed a lot of the fat off of Roy, Theodore, Sandy, and Carl’s stories. Nonetheless, kept enough in the film to make everything flow like butter.

I absolutely loved the film just as much as the novel. I would say it is probably one of the best adaptations I have seen in recent years! I would highly recommend people to at least check out the movie if you are not readers! With an all star cast, great bones of a story, and Netflix keeps getting better with their films (at least I think so).

I give The Devil All the Time Netflix Original five stars out of five. I felt that it did the book justice, the cast was perfect, and filming was beautiful, and the differences from the novel I felt were improvements on some levels. That is quite a task. Nevertheless, check out both the novel and movie today! Or just the movie if you hate to read like my big brother. Until next time, friends.

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Doll Peule

Sinister and Captivating!

Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2023

Verified Purchase

Story 4.5/5
Narration 5/5

Donald Ray Pollock's The Devil All the Time is a very well-written, gripping story.
I loved the atmosphere of this story. Everything was grim and dark.
All the characters are very well developed, and the plot is captivating. I loved that we, the readers, follow them through almost all of their tragic lives. There's Willard, who struggles with what's happening to Charlotte, his wife and the love of his life. Meanwhile Arvin, their son, is confronted with the ugliness of life from an early age and this will shape his future.
Carl and Sandy Henderson are a couple of serial killers. They live a miserable life, and they die one day after another, without realizing it. They are too immersed in the atrocities they commit.
Roy the naïve preacher and his guitarist friend are fleeing the law. All of these characters are the unluckiest no matter where they are or what they are doing.
This story is so realistic, I felt like I was with them in it. I was waiting to read how fate, or Donald Ray Pollock, was going to overwhelm them and keep them in a hopeless situation, without it being too much. This book is perfectly balanced, in my opinion.
I highly recommend, The Devil All The Time.

One person found this helpful

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Josh Gaines

A gritty, gut-wrenching follow-up to Knockemstiff, and a remarkable first novel.

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2012

Verified Purchase

I've talked about Donald Ray Pollock before, and even reviewed his first book, a collection of short stories called Knockemstiff. A couple days ago I finished his first novel, The Devil All the Time. I have to say; I'm dumbstruck at this man's writing.

Let's get a little history here: He grew up in Knockemstiff, Ohio (yes, that's a real city name, and a terrible place from the sound of things), then lived his adult life in Chillicothe, Ohio, working at a Mead paper plant until he was 50 years old. He enrolled himself, this late in life, into the Creative Writing program at Ohio State, got his first work published, and then `blew up' a little bit because his debut set of stories had a standing-ovation quote on it from Chuck Palahniuk (ahem... you may have heard of him). It always makes me so happy to hear of `underdog' stories like this, or of someone so talented coming out of nowhere and getting to do something creative with their lives after doing manual labor for so long. And the attention he so quickly received was not just hype, but well-deserved realization of a highly talented writer.

This book, like his short stories, takes place primarily in 1960's Ohio, which isn't `Southern land,' but it sure as heck has a profoundly dark Southern feel. The landscape is dusty and dry, and you can feel the grungy heat and sweat on every page. It follows an ensemble of characters and carries you through two generations of a family, all the while letting you peek behind the curtains into some seriously depraved character's lives.

Pollock has an amazing way of putting you into these scenes because he paints the surroundings so well, and believe me, they'll make you so uncomfortable you can't wait to move on. There are many moments that have the quality of a nightmare, a surreal and terrible circumstance that seems only to escalate deeper into darkness. However, the novel has a very uniform feel because the setting and general attitude of the cast of characters is so richly expressed, even if it's unpleasant.

I've tried to rack my brain for a book I've read in which the main characters were so... unlikeable, and I really can't come up with anything. There are really no protagonists here, no morally upright. Everyone is basically despicable and seeking only their own good, no matter the cost, and the ones who are acting out of `love' for another do so with deeply twisted motives. To give you an idea of these folks; a man who sacrifices animals and hangs their carcasses in trees as a blood sacrifice while he wails to the Lord until hoarse that his cancer-plagued wife would be healed, a husband and wife who seduce hitchhikers, then kill them slowly on the side of the road and take photographs of the process, a new preacher who comes to town with the primary intent of sleeping with underage girls in the congregation, and a traveling guitarist/preacher duo that uses shock-tactics like eating spiders while shout-preaching for the sake of making serious cash off of the ignorant townsfolk.

The Devil All the Time hits like a hammer, again and again, and there are so many times when you'll finish a chapter and be left thinking, "Oh, man that's messed up..." Why read a book like this, you might ask? Well, you might not want to after what I've said I guess, but despite all the darkness, it really is an amazingly engaging novel. If you can stomach a Tarantino film, particularly one like Pulp Fiction where you can't take your eyes off the characters even though you're not sure exactly why, then you could probably get some decent enjoyment out of this too. The plot is good, if not terribly original, the writing is excellent and the characters, well... they're interesting in their own way.

If Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? had zero humor, a lot more swearing, no music and gritty bloodshed, it might look a little like this novel. Good old fashioned Southern-fried, back-woods dark fiction. YUM.

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Christina P.

Brilliant Story

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 7, 2023

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Love this story - very dark and shocking, hard to put down. (The film is also great.)

Alfirin

Attention, pas pour les enfants.

Reviewed in France on September 25, 2023

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Entre le livre de poche et le livre "grand" format" (voir photo), l'ouvrage est arrivé en parfaite condition.
Je l'ai lu suite à l'adaptation cinématographique que je trouve fidèle au livre.
Si vous trouvez que le film a un certain impact, vous n'avez encore rien lu !
Le livre m'a ouvert la porte sur les écrits de cet auteur d'une réalité brutale et captivante.
Livre en anglais, certes, mais tellement d’argot que j'ai des difficultés à traduire ce que je lis même si je le comprends totalement. Déjà recommandé de vive voix à plusieurs personnes qui ne le regrettent pas.

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Paola Zúñiga

Incredible book

Reviewed in Mexico on September 23, 2020

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Once I started reading, I couldn't stop.

Debdip Chakraborty

Twisted, Dark, Grotesque and Hauntingly Beautiful

Reviewed in India on April 29, 2021

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The book is dark, the characters twisted, and the ending is bitter sweet. I wanted this book to go on, forever. Boy, does it hit you and how!
The author tries to fundamentally ask a lot of questions through his characters, and ultimately, it brings up a question: does the society make a human or the human make a society? The sins of our fathers, does it shape us or can we make better and go away from the vicious cycle?

The book is told from multiple point of views, and each entertaining, joyful and make up an enjoying read. I don't know if I should loathe myself for cheering on such dark, morally ambiguous characters.

And as told in the Bible, Ezekiel 13:3: "Thus saith the Lord God: Woe unto the foolish prophets that follow their own spirit ..."

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Rick Cheel

A lucky find!

Reviewed in Canada on June 23, 2017

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Right up there with the best southern noir that I've read. If you enjoy O'Connor, early Crews, McCarthy, Woodrell, etc. this novel will grab your attention. I look forward to reading more of RDP's work.

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