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Characters mesmerize in chilling debut novel

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By Vick MicKunas, Contributing Columnist 11:08 AM Saturday, July 9, 2011

“The Devil All the Time” by Donald Ray Pollock (Doubleday, 261 pages, $26.95)

Donald Ray Pollock had this dream. He nurtured it for 32 years while he labored in the Mead paper mill at Chillicothe. His dream? To become a writer. He wanted to write stories.

So Pollock typed the words of his favorite novels. One after another. Sentence by sentence. Phrase by phrase. He retyped the exact words of writers he respects. And in so doing, he was able to reveal the writer he wanted to be.

He left that paper mill and concentrated on his new craft. Pollock has a master of fine arts degree from Ohio State. He wrote his stories and gathered them together for the 2008 collection, “Knockemstiff.”

The stories in “Knockemstiff” were inspired in part by his experiences growing up in a godforsaken little hamlet called Knockemstiff. In my review of that book for this newspaper I wrote: “In Pollock’s fanciful imagination, this hardscrabble swath of Appalachia in south-central Ohio is gritty and nasty and downright terrifying. His version of Knockemstiff is peopled by losers. Druggies, grifters, rapists, thieves, perverts, killers — every manner of dead-end situation ricochets across these pages with the lethal force of flaming cars skittering toward that looming abutment. No happy endings should be expected.”

Pollock has expanded on this storytelling gift for his debut novel, “The Devil All the Time.” A gallery of reprobates and religious fanatics flutter through these pages. These are multidimensional, flawed human beings. Some pray for better days. Others imagine a resurrection.

The story begins in 1957 in Knockemstiff. We are introduced to Arvin Eugene Russell and his parents, Willard and Charlotte. Arvin’s mother is dying. His father is coping with this situation in a bizarre and grisly manner.

Arvin observes that “unless he had whiskey running through his veins, Willard came to the clearing every morning and evening to talk to God. Arvin didn’t know what was worse, the drinking or the praying. As far back as he could remember, it seemed that his father had fought the Devil all the time.”

Then we flash back a dozen years to 1945 when Willard was returning to Ohio following military service during the war. Pollock starts laying the foundation for this chilling morality tale. When Arvin was 4 years old his family had moved away to Knockemstiff to get their son away from “all the degenerates” in the paper mill town of “Meade.”

As readers move through time, we encounter unholy chapters of degenerates: Brother Roy and Brother Theodore are hustlers plying their swift trade at churches and carnivals. When we reach the mid-1960s we find Carl and Sandy Henderson. Each summer they venture from their home base in Meade to lure unsuspecting hitchhikers inside their black Ford station wagon.

Inexorable fate draws these story strands into ever-tightening loops as Pollock’s characters circulate in Ohio, West Virginia and along desolate highways to the south and west. Arvin evolves into a violent, utterly hopeless, yet brilliantly avenging angel. “The Devil All the Time” is a mesmerizing first novel. It could be cinematized into one heckuva motion picture.

Vick Mickunas interviews  authors every Friday at  1:30 p.m. and on Sundays  at 11 a.m. on WYSO-FM (91.3). For more information, go online to www.wyso.org/BookNook.html. Contact him at vick@vickmickunas.com.

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