The Devil All the Time

By: Donald Ray Pollock

Narrated by: Mark Bramhall

Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2011 Donald Ray Pollock (P)2011 Random House

Critic reviews

"If Pollock’s powerful collection Knockemstiff was a punch to the jaw, his follow-up, a novel set in the violent soul-numbing towns of southern Ohio and West Virginia, feels closer to a mule’s kick, and how he draws these folks and their inevitably hopeless lives without pity is what the kick’s all about." ( Publishers Weekly)

"The God-fearing hard-luck characters who populate Donald Ray Pollock’s debut novel, The Devil All the Time, move through the southern outlands of Ohio and the isolated hollows of West Virginia like figures in a collective nightmare of poverty, addiction, superstition, and crime" (Lisa Shea, ELLE magazine)

“This novel fulfills the promise made by Pollock’s debut collection, Knockemstiff. He is a real writer, and The Devil All The Time hits you like a telegram from Hell slid under your door at three o’clock in the morning.” (William Gay, author of Provinces of Night and The Long Home)

If you like depressing, It’s really good!

Yes this was a very morbid and depressing book, but it was so well done. I DID enjoy it. If you can’t tolerate its dip into the darkness of human nature, it isn’t for you. Lots of characters with questionable moral compasses, violence and murder. There is no “happy” ending, it just moves on.

I have not seen the Netflix movie yet, so I cannot compare. But really, I don’t expect the movie to follow the book to the letter anyway.

Incredible

This is one of the best books I’ve read in the last ten years. Incredible.

amazing, disturbing, vivid and unforgettable

A dark and vivid story narrated with a hypnotizing candor. you can almost feel the humidity and smell the blood.

mind-blowing storytelling

I love how the stories unravels & the effortless systemic evil is portraited. How the author tells the story clean and without his own opinion showing through. human nature at is worst, and best?

WOW What a FIND!

WOW! What a ride! Wonderful (if bizarre) characters, taut narrative, plot full of unexpected turns and extraordinary narration by Mark Bramhall (but then that is the only way he ever narrates -- extraordinary talent and skill)

Good But Rough

What made the experience of listening to The Devil All the Time the most enjoyable?

It’s a captivating story, hard to put down, but it’s also extremely rough. The dreadful & immoral element of man is pervasive in nearly every character, I felt dirty like I needed to clean my mind of the filth, however it’s very well written, and intriguing.

Have you listened to any of Mark Bramhall’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

no

Great and dark book

Where does The Devil All the Time rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Pollock explores the dark side of humanity. And he does it well. So matter of fact it hurts. I truly enjoyed this book.

just buy it

blew my expectations pit of the water. setting and day to day life of most characters made me more disturbed than the actual horrendous things they do.

great book

Just as good if not slightly better than the NetFlix adaptation. Well worth a read. Narrator was excellent!

Wow

Very good story and super engaging! I finished it in about a week, which is quick considering I usually only listen on the way to and from work. I found myself taking the longer routes home and even listening to the book while grocery shopping bc I didn’t want to stop listening!