The Devil All The Time by Donald Ray Pollack

This 2011 copyright is Pollack's 2nd. The followup to the acclaimed Knockemstiff recently reviewed here. Welcome to the sad, cruel world of southern Ohio and West Virginia circa 1945-1965 where Pollack weaves 3 separate stories into a cohesive statement of despair and the search for redemption desired by desperate people.

Story 1: Mid 1940's. Willard Russell returns from WWII in the south Pacific where he was witness to horrors no one should ever have to remember. No wonder he questions the existence of a God having seen what he's seen. But he is one of the many who came home, rolled up his sleeves, and started back to work and raise a family. He and his wife Charlotte are raising Arvin near Knockemstiff, Ohio in a rundown house off a 2 wheel dirt track just inside the tree line. But his wife takes ill and Willard comes back to religion, praying twice daily with Arvin and offering animal sacrifices at his prayer log up in the woods. When one of 2 drunk hunters comments on how he'd like to tap Willard's wife, Arvin is stunned that his dad doesn't come to her defense. But he does in his own time, beating the guy so severely that he is left to sit on a store's porch with a tomato coup can strung around his neck to catch his drool. Arvin never forgets. No amount of praying can save Charlotte from the cancer. Willard sends Arvin off to live with his wife's parents (Emma and Earskell) in Coal Creek, West Virginia and goes off to the prayer log to keep his wife's memory alive. His parents also have the orphaned pre-teen Helen living with them since her parents died in a fire.

Story 2: Advance now by about 10 years. Roy is a backwoods preacher from Topperville while his crippled cousin Theodore plays the guitar in the background. They do tent services and guest shots at the rural churches in West Virginia where Roy shows his faith by handling spiders. All things considered, they are doing OK. When they do a service in Coal Creek, Roy takes a shine to Helen (story #1) marries her and they bring Lenora into the world. Problem is that Roy has grown closer to Helen's charms (wink, wink) and begins to lose his preaching touch. Roy then feels the Lord is telling him he has the gift of resurrection and wants to try it out on some animals. Theodore convinces him that won't get them a radio deal, that only raising a human will sell. When Roy's first and only attempt fails, Roy and Theodore run off to the carnival sideshow life in the southeast leaving Lenora to live with the only parents his wife Helen ever knew, Emma and Earskill, who now have Arvin and Lenora to raise.

Story 3. Carl and Sandy Henderson are really something. He is a fat prick. With his camera and wife in tow, they pick up 'models' hitchhiking on the backroads of the midwest and plains states (but not Ohio. One of Carl's rules: don't shit in your own bed). They toy with their marks, getting them all hot and bothered over Sandy eventually turning off on some side road, laying out a blanket for their 'model' and Sandy to get it on only to have Carl put a .38 slug in their head, and then take pictures of Sandy and the corpse. In between trips, they mostly squat in a shack near Meade in southern Ohio while Sandy waits tables and turns tricks for extra money. They've been at this for 4 years, heading out each summer for a 2-3 week 'vacation'. And did I mention that Sandy is the sister of the sheriff of the county where they live? Her bro' Lee, as crooked as they come, is certain her hooking is going to eventually kill any chance at reelection.

Pollack collects the seemingly disparate stories together another 10 years later in the middle 1960's. Coal Creek's new preacher has the taste for teenage girls, impregnating Lenora who flips out, leaving Arvin to exact some measure of justice for Lenora. Theodore dies in the woods of Florida setting Roy off on a journey of redemption back to Coal Creek to see the daughter, Lenora, he gave up years ago. And Carl and Sandy decide to 'vacation' in the southeast instead of the midwest. Roy is hitchhiking in Tennessee when he gets picked up by Carl and Sandy. Arvin has to leave Coal Creek after the incident with the preacher and is headed for where his parents met and he was born. En route, his car falls apart and, you guessed it, has to hitchhike where, you guessed it again, Carl and Sandy pick him up. The resulting carnage brings Sandy's cop brother into play.

Whew. I'm not quite sure what to call this. Pollack pulls no punches in giving the reader an unsympathetic portrayal of the pathetic lives of the characters that populate his work. I don't think Pollack's goal is to get the reader to either identify with or become sympathetic to his characters (OK, maybe Arvin). This is fierce and unrelenting storytelling that drew me into his world with none of the cliff-hanger tricks in each chapter so common in mass market fiction these days. Other reviews say Pollack is an important new voice in American literature. I'm not quite sure what he is saying, but that won't stop the reader from paying attention. Serious stuff here, boys and girls. I wonder how long it will be before his 3rd.

East Coast Don

Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock

This is a real town, or rather a collection of decrepit shacks and trailers, in southern Ohio, just SW of Chilichothe, maybe 70 miles straight south of Columbus (home of THE Ohio State University) and probably a half hour north of Portsmouth, which sits on the Ohio River. Yes, it really does exist even though this is entirely fiction.

Pollock has assembled a series of interconnected short stories about the people who live in and around Knockemstiff, a place where “the hillbillies wouldn’t watch a TV show that had blacks on it.” Best I can tell, it begins in the 50s or 60s and runs up to about the 1990s, but the presentation is not chronological, nor does it need to be.

We open up a recount of Vern, a loud, uncouth papermill worker, his wife and 7 yo son Bobby at a drive-in theater. This is where Bobby sees his dad pick a fight in the canteen can with some bigger guy and damn near kill him right there in the toilet. The vic’s son, older than Bobby, tries to intervene and Bobby does his level best to keep the other kid out of the melee. On the way back to the car, Vern says to Bobby “You did good.” Bobby would remember this as “the only goddamn thing my old man said to me that I didn’t try to forget.”

Pollock then takes us through random acts of the locals. Like the 15yo kid who wanders along a creek, witnesses incest between neighbors slightly younger than he, decides he wants in, whacks the kid, takes the girl, drowns her, stuffs them in a small cave, and continues on with his life.

Those are just 2 of the 18 stories in this book. Characters go in and out of the tales, but each chapter is an end unto itself. Considering the behavior and actions of the locals, one would think that the inbreeding comes from the same tree that doesn’t branch. These people are some of the lowest, most degenerate, disgusting, dirty, mean, criminal people on the planet. They eat the 4 primary food groups: processed cheese, toast, baloney, fish sticks followed with a dessert of Oxy washed down with anything liquid that is handy. And if it isn’t Oxy, they might be sniffing Bactine from a plastic bag.

“Forgetting our lives might be the best we can do” sort of sums up what each of the characters do with their time. They all seem to “crave junk food the way a baby craves a tit.” And it’s not just the characters that seem to have risen out of the brine of the earth’s belly because “the damp gray sky covered southern Ohio like the skin on a corpse.”

As the decades pass, the locals fall prey to their own misdeeds like the guy with the metal plate in his head, the kid who sniffed too much junk and now does little more than scratch at his scalp, the 2 teenagers who keep trying to get a third laid (so he would be constantly berated by his dad for being a virgin), Vern has had 3 heart attacks and sits stuck to his fake leather easy chair, some grandfather who is still reliving Korea but refuses to wear adult diapers. One slowly decaying slug has an epiphany of sorts when he realizes, “that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it.”

Pollock apparently grew up in the region and worked the paper mill and other hard labor jobs, but has worked his way into an MFA program in creative writing at Ohio University in nearby Athens (full disclosure: I have degrees from both Ohio U and THE Ohio State University). One would have to consider that if the author gets high praise from Chuck Palahniuk that it would have to be pretty strange . . . and addicting . . . but still very strange.

So, should one willingly choose to pick up a book about desperate souls whose only glimpse of hope is tied up in movie mags who shiver in a nothing town of tilted trailers and abandoned cars hard by the dump, who get so sick from eating real food that they have the squirts in an alley only to get humiliated by local cops, all for some Oxy stolen from a nursing home? Only if you are afraid of being drawn into this sometimes violent and downright shitty world where Robert Earle Keen’s ‘Merry Christmas From The Family’ could be the God’s honest truth. If so, you might be missing one of the more literate presentations of (yes, I’ll say it) literature based in “a place people had grown up in, but never felt like home.”

East Coast Don