oh, great. another book i can never recommend to elizabethis book is vicious. understand that. this is a hyper-violent book, filled with completely unsavory characters in a filthy landscape where crimes are committed with breathtaking casualness. and i gotta confess, i loved itcause that's not all it is. this isn't just gratuitous violence for shock value and testing of the reader's limits. there is also that heartbreaking thing i love so much in my literature: small-town desperation. the frustr [...]

Donald Ray Pollock wrote this book using many characters, including preachers. There are at least three of'em in The Devil All The Time. One good old preacher is dying but won't admit it for nothing. The other two Well, they done got themselves into just the kind of trouble Mr.Pollock likes to write about. From the Bible we find in Matthew 5:9 "Blessed are the peacemakers " No. Wait a minute. That one doesn't apply here. There ain't no peacemakers in Knockemstiff, Ohio. so let's try Ezekiel 13 [...]

This compelling piece of fiction, written with a deft hand, takes the cake for disturbing and depraved. Unwavering in his delivery, Donald Ray Pollock gives us a peek at the world, through the eyes of some gnarly and grotesque individuals. What stands out is the casual ease in which the violence and carnage is served up, sans the antics that reek of shock value, making this deliciously dark plot palatable in some strange and unnerving way. That's not to say the reality these people call life is [...]

There’s chick litDick litMick litFlick litTrick litSick litQuick litAnd nowHick lit! Well, yes, an affectionate term which I learned from one of the various great reviews of this novel on , which probably doesn’t need another rave review, you all got the message now that Donald Ray Pollock is the real deal by now, but I feel compelled to tell you again. Because I’ve not been having such a great time with novels recently. A kind of chill has settled over our relationship. Neither of us want [...]

Every single star for this extremely dark and disturbing novel. Even though it took me a long time to finish, not once did I want to give up on it. I listened to the audio version. I think that the brilliant narration by Mark Bramhall added to this novel. He is one of the best narrators that I have come across. If you listen to audio this is a good one. This is my first Donald Ray Pollock novel but it certainly will not be my last. Highly recommended to people who can handle dark and disturbing [...]

This review has been revised and can be found at Expendable Mudge Muses Aloud.***2017 UPDATE***A FILM IS COMING***starring Robert Pattinson as Reverend Roy. This will be interesting.***It's National Book Lovers Day! A day to bask in the amazing power of books to inform, amuse, educate, and alter our views and viewpoints.Grim, dark, unsparing, and good.Reposting the review by request from a special friend:Rating: 4.8* of fiveThe Publisher Says: “Take a man from Ohio who's worked blue collar, se [...]

The places described in this book are said to be located somewhere in Ohio. Small towns and highways connecting them to other small towns with convenience stores, schools, cornfields, dirt roads, churches, wood-paneled homes and their sheds. But it doesn't take you very long to know that this decor is just a façade for where you really are. The plants have withered, the dogs are skinny, all eyes are dead. Everything is thirsty. The pure thirst for water is numbed and buried in dust. Alcohol and [...]

Willard Russell prays over a prayer log for his cancer-ridden wife with his son, Arvin. A spider-eating preacher is convinced he can bring back the dead. A husband and wife pick up hitchhikers, photograph them, and kill them. How will all of their paths intersect?Knockemstiff was one of my favorite books this year and I was anxious for Donald Ray Pollock to try his hand at a novel. Now I'm anxious for him to write a couple hundred more.The Devil All the Time dips into the same well as Knockemsti [...]

This is a beautifully-written, captivating book about a number of mostly poverty-stricken rural characters, some of whom are down on their luck and others of whom are simply bad to the bone.Set in rural Ohio and West Virginia, the story takes place over a period from the end of World War II until the middle of the 1960s. It weaves together the strands of several different stories, and the characters include a husband and wife team of serial killers who hunt their male "models" along the nation's [...]

The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock's tales from a ghost town“Just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul? Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. [...]

Hey, parents, having problems getting you kids to behave in church? Let them spend a Sunday with Willard Russell. Willard isn’t a preacher, and he doesn’t have one of those big mall-like mega churches. What Willard has is a log in the woods. That’s right, a damn log in the woods. A prayer log if you will, and he’s hung up some crosses around it, and he makes sure that his son Arvin is out there all the time praying with all he’s got. Don’t mind all that dried blood and animal bones. [...]

A preacher who eats spiders, trying to strike his own parable with the church folk. His little talks with Jesus end up turning his deluded notions into full blown insanity. A husband and wife comb the backroads picking up young male hitchhikers, all of them coming to an end in a true photo finish. The woman, thinking herself a slightly better class of trash than her husband, idly scratches her “jigger” bites and dreams of moving on without him. A sheriff who recognizes that being the law in [...]

Find all of my reviews at: 52bookminimum/“As far back as he could remember, it seemed that his father had fought the Devil all the time.”Interested in reading Mitchell’s #1 pick so far this year? Are you sure you’re ready for the darkness that is the black hole of his heart? Positive?????? Alrighty then, here goes . . . When Ron 2.0 recommended The Devil All the Time to me I told him to f*&^ off did what I normally do – added it to my TBR where it would promptly be forgotten by my [...]

Read the Donald Ray Pollock Recommends Books page, put together from an interview i had with Donald Ray Pollock Here.Beware some brutal characters contained within this story.The name Pollock strikes up images in my head of the paintings of Jackson Pollock the painter, that splatter art. Well this Pollock is just as creative with his storytelling that leaves a deep branding in your mind and soul of a human stain of evil characters, that will stay with you well after you have finished this book. [...]

Not a book with fairy tales and happy endings.This book shows the darkness that can linger in people's souls. Willard Russell believes if he and his son Arvin pray over his "prayer log" long enough it can save his doomed wife Charlotte from the cancer ravaging her body. It might now be enough to just pray alone though. he adds some sacrificial blood.So begins this tale. Setting in rural Ohio and West Virginia. Pollock shows the side of poor rural life that I hope to never see.The characters in t [...]

Jesus wept, but this is the real goods people -- gritty, raw, uncompromising prose that snaps and bites at your soft spots. I find it curious that so many people have shelved Pollock's sophomore novel as horror, because while it is horrifying in places, and deals with some chilling characters, horror it is not. In his review of Pollock's debut Knockemstiff, Kemper uses the terms redneck noir and hick lit and that's much closer to capturing what this novel is offering to anyone who dares pick it [...]

Friends, when I look out into those teaming masses, that sea of nameless faces mindlessly distracted by some mobile device, do you know what it is that I see reflected back in those blank stares? I tell ya what I see is a whole mess of dull witted, primped, and pampered sissies, as soft as a doughnut. I reckon it's about time to put down that screen, and crack open this good book here, and take a glimpse of how things once was in that not so distant past of ours. Then you ought to thank your luc [...]

Είναι παράδοξο πως ένα τέτοιο βιβλίο, με την θεματολογία που έχει, βρήκε τέτοια απήχηση. Ή, σίγουρα, είναι παράδοξο πως τελικά μου άρεσε.Ο μόνος λόγος που το ξεκίνησα ήταν πως ήθελα να διαβάσω κάτι Αμερικάνικο. Αυτό το Αμερικάνικο με την στιβαρή προσέγγιση, την σωστή, χωρίς τ� [...]

Gritty crime thrillers* are not generally my cup of tea, be they in fancy pants, shiny new hardcovers in the Literature section or shitty paperbacks in the mass-market rows of shame where all the bored housewives hang out. There seems to more often than not be this sort of straight to the point, unsalted cracker style to the writing which leaves me feeling dissatisfied. I mean, sure, I know some people in real life who parrot the same words and stories, use "like" and "ummm" as ways to pause in [...]

WOW!, reading this was like the equivalent of being sent to the electric chair and having your ashes blasted to the depths of hell!, everything is drenched in so much evil and suffering, the two serial killer lovers who hit the road looking for their next victim truly sent shivers down my spine, and there were many moments that really packed a nasty punch!. The thing that impressed me most was this could have turned into a standard horror/thriller but it's far more a human drama of hope and rede [...]

*4.5 Stars*Sometimes I find it difficult to put into words what I really liked about a particular book. This novel is one of those. It's a nihilistic portrait of rural life in Ohio and West Virginia for a disparate group of fucked up individuals as they struggle to not only survive within the parameters that life and fate has stuck them with, but also with their own inherent impulses and desires. It's an admirable, well-conceived debut novel that is brutal but manages to not feel gratuitous. The [...]

From the blurb: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 V [...]

The Devil all the Time is a dark, gritty and downright dirty tale, yeah that's perfect for a story that I found pretty bloody enjoyable in places. The Players. Carl and Sandy Henderson are two killers that pick up hitchhikers and have their wicked way with them, photographed for all posterity in their final moments. Roy and Theodore, lead a chequered existence, preaching the Lord's word while skirting the edge of decency and the law. To prove their faith they kill with all intentions of bring [...]

If you're a fan of crime fiction and don't mind when it bleeds over into southern gothic, then do not miss Donald Ray Pollock's first novel, The Devil All the Time. Critics and readers are comparing his work about the sinning and redemption that takes place by sweaty characters in small hick towns to Flannery O'Connor's. That's a spot-on comparison, especially if compared to O'Connor's novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, but I would add that some of the more repugnant scenes remind m [...]

Dark story and even darker characters. This has (for me) a fair helping of Daniel Woodrell's country noir about it. Some of the players in this tale are good and some are just plain bad. But even in the good characters badness lives just below the surface. There's not a lot of hope here. That is unles you think the ending promises some sort of redemption. I loved this book. It's superbly written without a glimpse of a spare word. I'll be searching out more of the author's work very soon.

Ένα σύγχρονο αριστούργημα!!! Χρόνια έχει να με εντυπωσιάσει και να με καθηλώσει ένα βιβλίο τόσο πολύ όσο αυτό. Ανυπομονώ για το επόμενο βιβλίο του Pollock. Μπορεί να υπολογίζει πλέον, σε άλλον ένα μεγάλο θαυμαστή του.

Illustration Andrew Neal "Sempre o Diabo" primeiro romance de Donald Ray Pollock (n. 1954) é um thriller que entrelaça magistralmente as histórias das várias personagens, numa narrativa fragmentada, verdadeiramente intensa e angustiante, com descrições macabras e doentias - enquadradas por paisagens do sul do Ohio e da Virginia - num registo de violência satânica sem limites. Willard Russell é um veterano de guerra que regressa a casa transtornado pela matança e pela crucificação oco [...]

Recommended ReadingUnless he had whiskey running through his veins, Willard came to the clearing every morning and evening to talk to God. Arvin didn't know which 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. If you're looking for a piece of southern literature full of sunny people who live nothing but the good life you'll want to steer clear of this book; it's not for the faint of heart. Imagine you're abou [...]

Θες καλό αστυνομικό με αγωνία για το δολοφόνο και τρελαίνεσαι για τα ατμοσφαιρικά στοιχεία ενός θρίλερ; ΜΗΝ ΤΟ ΔΙΑΒΑΣΕΙΣ!Εγώ κάτι τέτοιο φαντάστηκα στην αρχή. Κακώς!Δεν απογοητεύτηκα όμως γιατί το κατάλαβα σύντομα. Ίσα ίσα που λόγω της καλής γραφής του το ευχαριστήθηκα τελ [...]

It's been two days since I finished this one.I am 30% of the way through another novel now, and I still can't getThe Devil All the Time out of my mind.Wow, where to start? This is an incredibly fast read, just over 260 pages, but there are so many turns to the plotlines that, at one point late in the novel, I was reminded of one development that seemed so long ago that I thought it was from another book!Donald Ray Pollock has done what I envy in only a few authors' skills (Ruth Rendell's A Sight [...]