The Devil All the Time: Book Review

I just finished reading The Devil All the Time, by Donald Ray Pollock. This is my second book by this author, having read Knockemstiff, which is a short story collection. All of his books fall firmly within the southern gothic tradition, with a gritty, stripped back prose used to tell the various stories of what are essentially villainous characters. These people have no self control, no compunction, and they all represent the worst of humanity. Just like the short story collection, this novel puts it all on display: we see everything from pedophilia to serial killers to necrophilia to animal sacrifice and worse. Pollock sits you down in the filth and makes you nestle in it.

If that's your thing, then this might be worth checking out.

Experience

I thought for a moment about what I wanted to write in this review because I did not think I had all that much to say in a traditional sense. The characters are not the most interesting or deep. They are described easily in the beginning, and they will repel you or they will draw you in accordingly. It's also not an intellectually stimulating novel. Yet that is not a fair critique. It's obviously not trying to be. And it's not stupid either—not by any stretch.

This keyed me into what the novel really is about. Pollock throws you into the muck. He thrusts you into the grime of the moment. He makes you experience the filth of these people and live in it. This is what this book lives on. Experience.

Experience is not even emotion, necessarily. You are left to react to the book in your own way; and perhaps your reaction to the experience will be entirely predictable, but that does not change the fundamental idea that raw experience is at the center of this story.

This highlights the power of Pollock's prose. It is not dense. Unlike someone like Tad Williams, he does not get lost in the heaps of verbiage that he dumps on the page. He is as sparse as he needs to be, while communicating just how nasty some of these people are, just on a visceral level. I'm not talking about their moral character, but their appearance, their mannerisms, and more.

What was surprising, however, was how much was left up to the imagination. I would have gone much further (I have gone further). Much of Pollock's sparse prose approach involves alluding to just how nasty things are, and letting the reader fill in the blanks. This is rather effective, similar to how keeping the monster in the shadows is effective in horror movies. Once you try to show too much, it's never as satisfying as the vague horror that people fill in with their imagination. Whether it's visceral sensory detail or a horror monster, the logic holds true.

Maybe. Haha. I'm not entirely convinced by this argument. I think we can afford to get a bit nastier with our descriptions, but this at least challenged me on that notion. I respect that.

Focus

I

The story starts out somewhat scattershot. There are disparate characters that are all over the map, and they have loose connections to one another, but the implication over the course of the novel is that they will begin to cross paths with one another. This fact—on its own—is fine, especially when the payoff comes at the end. In fact, this kind of story is fascinating and exhilarating in its own way. Where I think the story slips up is around the middle portion, where the plot begins to slow down, where the events seem to become non-linear (I say "seem" because I'm not exactly sure), and it was harder to follow along because the story would sling shot back and forth; this was especially the case in the storyline for the serial killers.

All of this said, while I have my complaints about the middle portion, I probably read the last one hundred pages in one sitting, which is incredibly rare for someone like me. Once the actual chain of events was set in motion, I was hooked—and the story deserves its praises for that alone.

II

One thing that stood out to me was that this novel was structurally a middle way between a novel and a collection of short stories. Especially when I got to the middle portion, where the plot slowed down and essentially became non-linear, I managed to push through by telling myself that I was essentially reading a collection of loosely connected short stories that would intersect at various points, hopefully in the end of the book. This is an important structural point about storytelling, where the lines between short stories and novels can actually be blurred. Going forward, I think I might take a few notes from this and apply it to my own work, perhaps to one world where I am writing novellas. We will have to see.

Hanging Thread?

There is one thread in this story that seems to be hanging there, namely the two pastors, who are only loosely related to the story at points. They kind of drop off the face of the story for a time, vast sections of their story being summarized and skipped over, only to gradually come back in at the end in a way that I thought was unsatisfying. I think this plotline could have been handled and stitched to the whole story a bit better during the middle section. In its present state, it's in an uncanny valley.

Ending

While the overall the story is very dark and disturbing in terms of its characters, the messaging, and the experience that it gives you—the ultimate message that it gives you is actually a (somewhat) positive one, which I thought was a nice touch. Stories can only really get away with really dark messaging when they lean heavily into philosophy or intrigue of some kind, which balances out the emotional drainage. This book understood what it had within it, and it landed on exactly the right note.

Conclusion

Overall, I enjoyed this book, despite the scattered and non-linear middle section. The ending third, in particular, was exhilarating. I think I will give it a 7.5/10.

Video: https://youtu.be/V3WDNJQKGyU