A psychotic rural recluse comes upon two siblings committing incest and feels compelled to take action. A father pumps his son full of steroids so he can vicariously relive his days as a perpetual runner up body builder. Rendered in the American vernacular with vivid imagery and a wry, dark sense of humor, these thwarted and sometimes violent lives jump off the page at the reader with inexorable force. Spanning a period from the mid sixties to the late nineties, the linked stories that comprise Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are woebegone, baffled and depraved but irresistibly, undeniably real. In this unforgettable work of fiction, Donald Ray Pollock peers into the soul of a tough Midwestern American town to reveal the sad, stunted but resilient lives of its residents.

With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain. Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. 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. There s the spider handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso guitar playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. There s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband and wife team of serial kill ers, who troll America s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. 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 sacrifi cial blood he pours on his prayer log. 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.

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 over tones of Flannery O Connor at her most haunting. 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.

Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock