The Devil All the Time
Donald Ray Pollock's debut novel, published in 2011, follows several intersecting lives across two decades in the back country of southern Ohio and West Virginia. There is Willard Russell, a war-haunted father who builds a prayer log in the woods, his son Arvin growing up under that shadow, a husband-and-wife pair who hunt hitchhikers, and a corrupt preacher with a guitar-playing cousin. The book is built like a series of long stories that slowly fold into one another. Pollock writes in plain, hard prose shaped by his years working in a paper mill, and his Ohio is a region of rusted cars, country churches, and unmarked graves. The novel was later adapted as a Netflix film, but the book is bleaker, stranger, and far more powerful.
What you might want to know about The Devil All the Time
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
From the end of World War II into the 1960s, a cast of preachers, killers, and lost souls move through the back roads of southern Ohio and West Virginia.
Bourdain was an early evangelist for Pollock, pushing the book in interviews and on social media and praising it as one of the strongest American debut novels in years.
Yes. The novel is violent and grim from beginning to end, and Pollock does not soften the religious or family abuse at its center.
The Devil All the Time was written by Donald Ray Pollock, published in 2011 by Anchor.
The Devil All the Time is 261 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Devil All the Time takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
The Devil All the Time is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
