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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.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0307744868
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor; Reprint edition (July 10, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780307744869
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307744869
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.15 x 0.93 x 8 inches
Reviewer: Negan 88
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Novel and Film Comparison Review
Review: 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.

Reviewer: Doll Peule
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Sinister and Captivating!
Review: Story 4.5/5Narration 5/5Donald 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.

Reviewer: Ramona Westbank
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: The plotting and character development lift this novel above it's gritty and sometimes grimy subject matter
Review: I first read this book in August 2011. Although it is a very dark tale of violence and depravity among rural poor in West Virginia and southeast Ohio, I had remembered it as very well-written and compellingly plotted, with vivid characters who rang true. I do not often re-read books within a decade but decided that I would revisit this one after six years. The novel stood-up well to the second reading and strongly reinforced my earlier impressions.The story centers around Arvin Russel, born in Coal Creek, WV in the 1950s to a recently returned GI and a waitress he’d met in Coal Creek on his bus ride home to Meade, Ohio. Arvin’s earliest vivid memory of his father, Willard, is from a time when he was in the woods with his father and they overheard a couple of hunters making crude sexual comments about Willard’s attractive wife, Charlotte. Initially Willard doesn’t react but later that day he finds the hunters at a local dive and runs one of them alone and beats him senseless. The other runs away. The lesson the incident teaches Arvin is that he should not take guff from anyone but also to carefully choose his moment to respond so that he is at an advantage.Charlotte soon becomes ill with cancer (there’s little money for doctors or medical diagnoses) and Willard tries to save her through animal sacrifices at a “Prayer Log” he has set up in the woods by their rented home. Willard’s efforts traumatize Arvin but fail Charlotte and she dies. Willard slits his own throat at the Prayer Log shortly thereafter. Arvin, orphaned, is sent to live with his grandmother and great uncle in Meade.Along with Arvin’s story, another main plot line follows a low-life couple in Meade, Carl and Sandy Harrison, who go on a multi-state serial murder spree, picking up and killing male hitchhikers. Carl photographs the hitchhikers in sexual encounters with Sandy and then shoots them and takes gruesome photos that he later uses for his personal gratification. There are two or three other related plot lines. Pollock deftly intertwines them, bringing the major characters together in the end.The strength of the novel is in the writing. Pollock skillfully captures the thoughts, emotions, motivations, quirks and peculiarities of the characters. The novel and its people reminded me in many ways of Erskine Caldwell’s Gods Little Acre and Tobacco Road novels, set in rural Georgia a few decades earlier. After reading the novel I felt like I knew the individuals well but also was relieved to be finished with them - at least until Pollock writes a sequel, which Arvin deserves.I’ve read that the novel is being turned into a movie starring James Pattinson, presumably as Arvin. The trick will be in translating the story to film in a reasonably palatable form. Again, the strength of the novel is Pollock’s writing and character development. If the filmmaker cannot evoke sympathy for Arvin and a few others in the story, it may just come across as gratuitously vulgar and violent.

Reviewer: M Cann
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: This is a dark book (very bad things happen) that is so well written that you can't stop reading. I have recommended this to several friends who had the same reaction.

Reviewer: Paul@Aude_France
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: The author can certainly pack a punch. The book is just over 220 pages longs in this edition but the reader gets a sense of a much longer story. It has an epic feel to it. It's filled with finely drawn characters and events both tragic and gruesome. A superb novel.

Reviewer: GM
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Romanzo capolavoro, che merita di essere letto in lingua originale! Secondo dopoguerra, provincia rurale americana, una serie di incroci malvagi tra personaggi bizzarri e corrotti che sembrano prevalere su tutto e tutti. Un ragazzo, allevato da un’anziana donna che non era sua madre, dovrà affrontare in varie tappe dolorose tutto il male che il destino gli ha riservato.

Reviewer: Paola Zúñiga
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Once I started reading, I couldn't stop.

Reviewer: Debdip Chakraborty
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: 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 ..."