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    The Devil All the Time
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    The Devil All the Time
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    The Devil All the Time
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Devil All the Time

    Written by Donald Ray Pollock

    Narrated by Mark Bramhall

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    From the acclaimed author of Knockemstiff-called "powerful, remarkable, exceptional" by the Los Angeles Times-comes a dark and riveting vision of 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJul 12, 2011
    ISBN9780307941367
    Unavailable
    The Devil All the Time
    Author

    Donald Ray Pollock

    Donald R. Pollock is the author of Knockemstiff and The Devil All the Time.

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    Reviews for The Devil All the Time

    4/5

    402 ratings36 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Life is just so sad for the people in this rural noir novel of unrelenting bleakness. It's a good book, but it depressed the hell out of me. There is a husband/wife team of serial killers. A spider-handling preacher teamed with a disabled, guitar-playing pedophile. An orphan who learns vengeance from his father. A prayer log is sanctified by blood (and you may not want to know where the blood comes from). There are suicides and murders and just general despair. Lessons to learn - stay away from preachers, do not hitchhike, keep away from rural America, no good comes from guns and people are bad. If you're in the mood for this, you'll probably like this well-written book. The narration by Mark Bramhall of the audio book is very good, although I needed to speed it up.
    • 5/5
      I'd recently read a review of Donald Ray Pollock's most recent novel that sounded interesting, but it wasn't available in our local library. I decided to go father back into his catalog and found 'The Devil All the Time', his first full-length novel. I can't imagine a more auspicious, audacious, and disturbing beginning for a 'new' author.'The Devil....' is going to be one of those books that won't be soon forgotten. It's set in the period following WWII up into the 60's in the hilly region of Ohio and West Virginia and 'stars' an intermingled mix of characters that include crooked police, serial killers, good religious folk, bad religious folk, poor people, hillbillies..... you get the picture. And lots of violence, believe me.The various subplots are threaded together expertly and tied up neatly (well, as neatly as possible based on what occurs at the end, anyway) at the conclusion. I won't go into details on the main plot(s), but suffice to say that it's not a 'traditional' whodunnit, mystery, or thriller, but is more of a slice of life over a number of years of a group of violent, hard luck people from a rough part of the country in an era of change for the country. What's most impressive to me is the writing. The tone, flow, pace, and dialogue are strongly evocative of that period and place. There's nothing fancy in the prose, just very straightforward writing that seems to effortlessly fit the action. Some of the content is violent, some is downright gross, but none of it seems gratuitous. I've heard Mr. Pollock's writing compared to a number of famous writers, O'Connor, Faulkner, and Cormac McCarthy among them. I've not read O'Connor or Faulkner for years but am very familiar with McCarthy and I'd have to say that I can see some similarity there. Pollack's initial novel is a great one, but it's not for the squeemish. If you can take the violence and nastiness you'll be rewarded, but be advised that you may be in for a few nightmares.
    • 1/5
      Very disappointing as I did like his first book of stories, Knockenstiff. I just couldn't continue. The beginning was strong, but petered out quickly as the flesh began to rot. Sorry.
    • 5/5
      This is simply a teriffic book. It is so dark and powerful, but also beautiful and moving. It is about hard people, with hard lives, who make bad choices. It is about an America that is rarely discussed but surely exists. There is a line in the book that says something to the effect of "rich people did fine and dandy as long as things were going their way, but the minute the **** hit the fan, they fell apart like paper dolls left out in the rain." It really is very good.
    • 5/5
      Just brilliant! No sorry scrub the word 'just' because it's wrong-wrong-wrong! replace just with Fantastic, Wonderful, Brilliant. It's a a pin ball flipper of a read one that keeps tripping you up and slapping you about and still, yes still... you'll come back for more - Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant!!!
    • 5/5
      A fascinating debut novel. Pollock creates interesting characters who live in and around the Ohio and West Virginia backwoods towns. Arvin Russell grows up fast when his father resorts to desperate measures to try to save his dying wife. Once orphaned, he goes to live with his grandmother, who has already taken in her granddaughter, Lenora, after Lenora's mother is killed by her husband. We also meet Carl and Sandy, a married couple who take vacations each summer and kill hitchhikers after Sandy has sex with them and Carl take photographs of it all.The separate threads come together as expected and in a somewhat rewarding fashion. The sad, disturbed journeys that take these characters to the end of the novel are superbly written and intricately mesmerizing.
    • 5/5
      What an unbelievable book. I will say right at the top, this book is clearly not for everyone, especially younger readers as there are no limits when it comes to certain subjects and descriptions. That being said this book will blow you away. It sucks you in from the first page and you won't believe what you have read when you are finished. The way this author ties the multiple characters and storylines together is fantastic. I cannot recommend this book enough. I have recently read a couple of books from some of my favorite authors James Lee Burke, Randy Wayne White to name two and was completely disappointed at how bad their latest efforts were. It is a real shame that more books can't be written as well as this, or that author's such as this one, don't get the kind of Press, the above author's do.Read this book.
    • 5/5
      The book is dark, dark, dark, but if you can stand the heat it is a roller coaster of bloody mayhem. It has one of the most memorable anti heroes I have read in fiction in a long time. The bullets fly, the nooses fall and the knives slash but all in a folksy kind of way that hearkens to a much less bloody plot. Bad behaviors told in Mayberry.
    • 4/5
      Read in early 2012 on Kindle. This was a gripping, dark, violent and gritty tale of interweaving stories coming together. The chapters (and book) are very short which increases its readability.
    • 5/5
      This book was so captivating! Dark, violent, depraved and it never stopped fascinating. I went out and purchased "Knockemstiff" because I'm now hooked on Donald Ray Pollack's storytelling.
    • 5/5
      This is a book definitely not for the faint of heart (or stomach for that matter). Like others have said, every character in the book has some disgusting flaw, but the audience is driven towards them like a moth towards light (horrible comparison, I know). I love how all the characters eventually intersect and that there is still a main character through all of it. The dialogue is what first made me love this book. Being southern, Pollock was spot on with how we hillbillies talk. I love how you also get a sense of Tennessee and Ohio through his dialogue as well. There was really nothing about this book I disliked. I appreciated the plot twists because they honestly were surprises to me, and I loved how the short chapters made for easy reading. I wish I could go on and on about how much I enjoyed this book, but I usually only write long reviews when I thoroughly disliked a book. At least I know I will have Arvin Eugene Russell stuck in my head for the next days. Or weeks. Or months even.
    • 1/5
      This book definitely suffered because I read it right after Winter's Bone. I was still looking for something redneck (for lack of a better term) and this seemed a good prospect. Well-written, but too disjointed to really hold together as a novel. It's dark and violent (that's not a problem), but I need a novel to hang together as a novel and this just didn't. Ultimately its brutality was just boring for me.
    • 5/5
      This is southern gothic writing at its very best! I could not put it down. A devout southern mama, a traumatized veteran, a spider-wrangling preacher, a crooked sheriff, a couple of orphans, oh- and a husband-wife serial killing team; Pollock weaves together the lives of several characters taking them from the end of WWII through the 60s. What I learned: Don't make bargains with God... and read all of the Donald Ray Pollock work I can get my hands on! I want to know more about a place in Ohio called Knockemstiff.
    • 4/5
      I really like this book. The way mr pollock writes keeps my interest the whole way through(which isn't easy to do). Again this story takes place near his home town of Knockemstif, Ohio. Really has some interesting characters to follow and get disgusted with. Although you do find yourself routing for some of them. Overall definitly worth your time to read
    • 5/5
      Reason for Reading: I love dark southern fiction. The type of book where the characters reach redemption by the end or at least try to, but they all, mostly, end up dead anyway.This is indeed a dark book and I just loved it! The story revolves around three separate pairs of individuals who eventually share some ties, but most of all they connect with Arvin Eugene Russell, the orphan of one of the individuals. The book starts out with the story of Willard and Charlotte Russell. Willard marries Charlotte soon after he comes back from WWII, they move out into the back country, have a son and then Willard is tormented as his wife is ravished by cancer and he sacrifices buckets of blood to his "prayer log." Next are spider handling preacher Roy and his crippled guitar playing sidekick Theodore, fakers, who end up running from the law for murder. And finally there is photographer Carl and Sandy Henderson husband-and-wife serial killer team who every summer "go on the road" and randomly brutalize and kill men. But joining all three together is Arvin Eugene Russell, orphaned son of Will and Charlene, who grows up to be a good man but with a violence of his own.This was a page-turner for me that I completed easily over the course of two days. Not only was the story compelling in an often-times gut-wrenchingly perverse manner, but there were times when one saw how some of the antagonists had started off as victims themselves. The writing is topnotch and the characterization of a whole cast of people who are mostly downright unlikable and unsympathetic yet somehow ultimately human is finely-tuned. A mixture of religion, southern Gothic and haunting people, places and plots creates a dark story indeed. Not suitable for those who like happy endings. I found the ending redemptive and satisfying but those who like most characters to be alive at book's end will find this is not the book for them.
    • 3/5
      I cannot find the zest some other readers have for this book. The word that kept rolling through my mind as I read was 'disjointed'. There is no main character. Almost every character has a point of view and there are countless POV shifts, often within the same paragraph. At times I found it dizzying to keep up with. Eventually, the reader finds the loose common thread holding these people together. The more obvious commonality and the only thing that truly stood out for me was the twisted minds of a large group of disturbed characters. There is no good in anyone here. If each scene is taken on its own, these 'stories' are well written, intense and chilling. As a group, put together in novel form, it didn't work for me. I needed coherence but didn't find it.
    • 5/5
      Fucking great man !!!!!!! Oh yeah!!!! Baby!!!!! Three more words !!!!!!!!!
    • 5/5
      Can. Not. Wait. to see Robert Pattinson as one of the sick and twisted characters in the movie version of this dark and disturbing book.

      Read it and then watch it. Coming to Netflix September 16th, 2020.
    • 4/5
      Seamless storytelling even if the story is not for all tastes.
    • 4/5
      This is one dark book. I love that about it. In fact, it was much darker than I expected and that is not a bad thing. It lived up to what I expect when someone describes a Southern Gothic novel. The characters are very dark and very violent. There is a returned World War II vet who falls for a beautiful waitress and settles in Knockemstiff, Ohio. He is kind of a crazy wilderness lay preacher who attempts to pray away his wife’s cancer. Fair warning to sensitive readers, some of his worship involves animal sacrifice that is quite graphic.There are two crazy travelling preachers who are every stereotype of “Deliverance” characters that you can think of – including the squeal little piggy variety. Those that have read the book or seen the movie will understand.My favorite creepy couple was Carl and Sandy. Every year they take a two to four week sojourn to different parts of the country and embark on a serial killing spree. It involves sex, photography and death.What is most interesting is that at different points in the book, all of these disparate stories converge. There were times that I was wondering where this was all headed and then the characters would meet. It made sense when it happened but one thing I loved about that was the author never felt the need to speed the story towards these meetings.In that sense, the story unfolds at a nice, slow, southern pace. And if I am picturing this story as a color it would be very black with shades of gray and some white. Apparently there is another book called “Knockemstiff” by the same author. I assume that it continues or precedes this one and that it is populated by some of the same characters.I definitely felt like there was more to say in the story. Even the peripheral characters had very fascinating glimpses that made me want to know more. This was a great bargain and I would not hesitate to recommend this book to other readers.
    • 4/5
      Not for the faint of heart.... Starts dark gets darker then pitch black finishes with a tiny glimmer in the end.
    • 5/5


      Awesome book and beautifully written. Disturbing yet not sadistic, just amazing prose and profile of complex personalities in the Appalachian wasteland. Thoroughly enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      Ohio, a land of great writers, including Donald Ray Pollock. The book was recommended to me by the Horror Aficionados over there in Good Reads. The book was an original in the field of Southern Gothic, as it takes place in Ohio, not in the deep south of O'Connor. The rural descriptions were eerie, especially when I was reading it in Cedar Key and Monticello Florida. I was feeling like these could be my neighbors. so I didn't go out of my way to be friendly. The book will also cure your need to hitch-hike.* The characters are all flawed and all in need of redemption. However, the redemption they find is straight from the devil. It was a good read but at times the author lost me in his writing. I got bogged down in all of the details, this could be the fault of the reader, or the author's or a bit of both. But the book's enjoyment at times lagged. The book was all in all beautifully written.
    • 1/5
      Ughhh fuckoff. this is supposed to be something called "american gothic" but there's not enough psychological insight to make the ugliness real and interesting and not enough surrealism or symbolic resonance or atmosphere to make it compelling in any actual gothic or Jungo-mytho-oneiric-archetypal or similar sense. (That would be especially hard because Pollock is ostensibly selling an I-was-a-coal-miner-meself authenticity, but the unrelenting bloodlust and perversity in this book is cartoonishly inauthentic.) Everyone is horrible, everyone suffers, real good old-time Bible-belt self-flagellation stuff. It's pornography, in short.
    • 4/5
      Sehr guter Roman, der die Atmosphäre in der US-Provinz der 50er und 60er Jahre sehr gut beschreibt. Die Hauptfiguren haben alle existenzielle Probleme und finden am Ende zusammen, auch wenn es nicht jeder überlebt...
    • 5/5
      Recommended for: Fans of Faulkner, McCarthy. O'ConnorMany times while reading The Devil All the Time I thought of Flannery O'Connor, especially her "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Also, a couple of times Joyce Carol Oates's short story, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" came to mind. Both excellent stories, and I recommend them highly if you like The Devil All the Time. It's not so much in the way Pollock writes, he's not a copy cat, but has his own style and voice. It's more the content that reminds me of those other stories.The novel follows the life of Arvin Russell: beginning with him and ending with him. The other characters, though initially seeming to have nothing to do with Arvin, all slowly become part of his story. I got the feeling of a drain swirling, with whatever is caught in that whirlpool moving ever closer to the center; in this case the center is Arvin. The characters are well written and the tension is pretty good and the chapters are fairly short: which means "I can get one more chapter in before I go to sleep." Then, four chapters later, I actually close the book. It kept me interested. Pollock's novel is set in and around Knockemstiff, Ohio, which was new to me. And some of the description reminded me of Cormac McCarthy's novels set in Tennessee, especially the shorter ones, like Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, and Child of God. I stumbled onto Donald Ray Pollock during some research for another author. I found that Pollock had won several awards and honors for his work and decided I would read something by him. I was not disappointed.If you like the stories mentioned above, or other stories, such as The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant (recently adapted into the film Lawless), or Faulkner or McCarthy, then I would recommend The Devil All the Time. Now, that's not to say that if you don't like any of those I have mentioned, you won't like this book. The best I can say is: read it and see for yourself.
    • 4/5
      A very dark, brutal and depressing novel, but well written and strangely engrossing. Basically, a bunch of characters in the midwest go around killing people (and mistreating women), only for their paths to intersect in the final chapters. I actually acclimatized to the violence, against my better judgement, and changed from viewing the omnipresent guns as a form of justice, rather than the dangerous weapons they are, so low were the personalities and so frequent the murders. Not exactly a bedtime story, but definitely worth reading.
    • 5/5


      This was a little weird for me - which is probably the reason why it's taken me over a week to write this review. On the one hand, Donald Ray Pollock is an entertaining writer. His horror is extremely graphic and bloody, but that's my thing. Pollock does amazing writing about very specific places. Which leads to why this was weird bordering on difficult for me...

      His books are set in the same place; the middle of Appalachia, which some people who live nearby call "coal country". My mother's family are all from west central PA. The area is full of both abandoned and recently restarted coal mines, company towns, and a lot of the type of person Pollock writes about so well. I can't really say more because it would involve spoilers. But I will say that all of the characters and all of the different subplots are woven together throughout.

      If you have a strong stomach for the gory, give this a shot. You won't be sorry.

















































































































    • 5/5
      My rating: 4.5 of 5 starsSource: Library Checkout"...rich people did fine and dandy as long as things were going their way, but the minute the shit hit the fan, they fell apart like paper dolls left out in the rain."The Devil All the Time spans decades and showcases several unforgettable individuals. We're first introduced to Willard Russell, an extremely religious man who sacrifices animals to his 'prayer log' in hopes that it will keep the cancer from taking his wife. His son, Arvin, is irrevocably changed by this period of his life. We're also introduced to a preacher that believes he possesses the ability to bring people back to life, but when he kills and his ability abandons him he is forced to flee. And lastly is the couple that travel the country picking up hitchhikers, killing them brutally, and taking pictures as mementos. 'Only in the presence of death could he feel the presence of something like God.'The Devil All the Time is comprised of some of the most perverse characters I've likely ever read. Incredibly violent and brash in both characters and the story itself. There is suicide and rape and several brutal killings of both humans and animals but it somehow manages to not ever get to the point of gratuitous; rather, the actions of these individuals were conducted with a casualness and almost flippant manner that was fitting for them.The desperation and overall mindset of these individuals in this small backwoods town (Knockemstiff, Ohio - which is actually a real town where Donald Ray Pollock himself grew up) was astounding. No one seemed to have big life plans, they all seemed to be extremely simple people. Except for the perverse ones.'...he pulled the trigger and a wad of wet, gray brains show out the other side of the college boy's head. After he fell over, blood pooled in the sockets of his eyeballs like little lakes of fire...'I'm not usually one for religious stories but these were tantalizing yet so shocking; my eyes were likely the size of dinner plates every time I was reading. It was quite like watching a train wreck, I couldn't have torn my eyes away even if I tried (or wanted to). These seemingly unconnected story lines come together in a way that surely shocked the hell out of me. This was a completely enthralling story, I hope we can expect more from Mr. Pollock. Big thanks to Rory for the push to finally read this.
    • 4/5
      Fast, thoroughly engaging read in which a group of people, connected either by blood or occupation, destroy themselves, each other, and/or the people around them. There is an awful lot of misery and depravity in this book, but behind it there is also love and tenderness...it's a great writer who can pull that out from this kind of dark story. Compelling characters, multiple interesting and inter-connected stories, and some really good prose make this a fine, fine read.