The Devil All the Time

A dark and riveting vision of America from the award-winning author of Knockemstiff. For fans of No Country for Old Men and Natural Born Killers.

In rural Ohio and West Virginia, faith, violence and damage pass from life to life. 
NOW A MAJOR NETFLIX FILM STARRING TOM HOLLAND AND ROBERT PATTINSON In Knockemstiff, Ohio, Willard Russell returns from war carrying damage he cannot leave behind. When his wife Charlotte falls ill, his love turns desperate, then fanatical, until the prayer ground in the woods becomes a place of sacrifice, terror and grief. His son Arvin is left to grow up in the shadow of that inheritance. Sent to live in Coal Creek, he becomes fiercely protective of Lenora, a lonely, devout girl whose faith makes her vulnerable to men who know how to hide cruelty behind scripture. Around them move others shaped by the same brutal country: Carl and Sandy Henderson, killers on the highways; Roy, a broken preacher running from an old crime; and men of the law whose respectability is no protection against corruption. The Devil All the Time is a dark American literary crime novel set in post-war rural Ohio and West Virginia. Donald Ray Pollock binds its separate lives into one grim inheritance, where religious obsession, family loyalty and violence drive Arvin towards a reckoning he cannot avoid. 
'Superb' The Times 'Terrifying ... an unsettling masterwork' GQ

Hits you like a telegram from Hell slid under your door at three o'clock in the morning

William Gay, Author of Provinces of Night and The Long Home

Donald Ray Pollock redefines the term 'American Gothic', taking Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner and turning them up to 11...once you start reading it doesn’t let go

One of the most adventurous and significant writers of our time … If the Coen Brothers want their next Oscar they should buy the rights to this book now

Like being dragged backwards through a briar patch by William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor while Nick Cave howls hosannahs at a blood-black moon

Braiding his plotlines into a taut narrative, Pollock is poised to emerge as a new hero of fans of the American gothic literature

If Pollock's powerful collection Knockemstiff was a punch to the jaw, his follow-up ... feels closer to a mule's kick

Sticky, violet and exhilarating - Pollock's southern gothic tale of thrill killers, pervy preachers and vengeance is best read on a long road trip or at a seedy model poolside

Dynamite Hole / Real Life (Storycuts)

Two short stories: a violent act spurs a vagrant to action; and bathroom brawls and childhood memories.

Don Pollock grew up in Knockemstiff and worked in the Mead papermill for thirty-two years before leaving to become a writer. He teaches literature and composition at Ohio State University.

In 'Dynamite Hole', Jake has been living wild in the hills of Knockemstiff since he took exception to the drafting process in World War II. When he witnesses an act of sexual transgression by the pond, things start swirling around inside him 'like a storm cloud', and Knockemstiff is soon to have a few more empty beds. 
 
In 'Real Life', a trip to the drive-in with his parents winds up in bathroom brawl and a hasty departure for seven year-old Bobby. Looking back on his childhood, Bobby finds in that evening an isolated piece of paternal pride. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these two stories were previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Hair's Fate / Knockemstiff (Storycuts)

Two short stories: a haircut punishment leads to a drastic decision; and an imminent elopment causes disquiet.

In 'Hair's Fate', when Daniel's father chops off his hair with a kitchen knife for meddling with his younger sister's doll, he decides to leave home. He hitches a ride with a trucker by the name of Cowboy Roy who plies him with liquor and pills, before suggesting a disquieting solution for Daniel's hair problem. 
 
In 'Knockemstiff', Hank has been sweet on Tina Elliot for some time. When he hears that she's planning on lighting out for Texas with her boyfriend, he allows himself to get a little pensive-even if it makes a long day's work at the store feel that little bit longer. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these two stories were previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Bactine / Giganthomachy / Pills (Storycuts)

Three short stories: an evening of solvent abuse; the war fantasies of two children; and all revved up but going nowhere.

In 'Bactine', a toothless layabout takes a break from nursing his crippled uncle and spends the evening abusing solvents with an acquaintance. The fumes only serve to exacerbate his dismay, though, and a trip to an all-night coffee shop causes some unpleasant recollections to surface. 
 
In 'Giganthomachy', Teddy and William are two nine year-old boys who like to argue over whether they'll play nuclear war or Vietnam games in the yard. William's more fantastic suggestions rile Teddy, who suffers enough deranged fantasy when he retreats inside every evening. 
 
In 'Pills', Bobby and Frankie take a notion to leave Knockemstiff for California and a new life amongst the film stars. But the four stolen bottles of pharmaceutical grade speed they'd intended to fund the trip with prove mighty alluring, and the road out of the township grows ever more elusive. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these three short stories were previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Lard / Schott's Bridge (Storycuts)

Two short stories: a son's persistent virginity becomes an issue; and an inheritance is put to use on a daunting supply of hallucinogenic drugs.

In 'Lard', Duane's virginity is getting to be a problem. Not so much for Duane as it is for his friends and his father-whose workmates rib him mercilessly about his son's frigidity. Deciding that his friends' regular outlets are not to his taste, Duane sets about fabricating an encounter. 
 
In 'Schott's Bridge', Todd has 'too much sugar in him' for Knockemstiff. Even so, he ignores his grandmother's dying wish that he use the two thousand dollars she'd bequeathed him in a coffee jar to get himself out of town. Kicked out of the house by his uncle, he takes to living by the creek with Frankie Johnson and a daunting supply of hallucinogenic drugs. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these two short stories were previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Fish Sticks / Rainy Sunday (Storycuts)

Two short stories: a mental journey back to Florida; and rain has an adverse effect on the victim of a car crash.

In 'Fish Sticks', Del is washing his one good pair of black jeans on the eve of his cousin's funeral. He imagines he can hear the sea off the Florida coast in the rumblings of the machines, and casts his mind back to a trip the two made to Florida when they were teenagers. 
 
In 'Rainy Sunday', Sharon's husband hasn't been quite right since he crashed the car and wound up with a steel plate in his head. Wet weather tends to set him off on one of his spells. Reluctantly, Sharon leaves him alone and takes off on a late-night mission to help her aunt find some company. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these two short stories were previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Assailants / Discipline / Honolulu (Storycuts)

Three short stories: the tedium of home life isn't so bad; like father (un)like son; and memories of Honolulu...

In 'Assailants', Del's wife hasn't left the house in six months. He likes to escape the tedium of home life with his unhinged wife and baby daughter by courting blackouts with alcohol and drugs. However a trip to the late-night convenience store reveals a latent marital affection. 
 
In 'Discipline', Luther Colburn has twenty-one inch arms and a fifty-four inch chest. He struggles to instil the discipline that has aided this extreme hypertrophy into his son and protégé, Sammy. When Sammy's ideas run counter to his father's, Luther gets a late vision of his son's unique merit. 
 
In 'Honolulu', Howard Bowman is struggling to remember things. Every morning his wife sets him a challenge or two to try and keep his mind oiled and active. While the names of associates past and present elude him, certain isolated events come back. He gets to thinking about one evening on furlough in Honolulu. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these three short stories were previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Holler / I Start Over (Storycuts)

Two short stories: Tom shacks up with the family of a casual girlfriend; and Bernie treats himself to a new car during a dull retirement.

In 'Holler', when his wife throws him out, Tom shacks up with the family of a casual girlfriend. They leave it to him to bathe, shave and keep a jug of wine within a straw's reach of their disabled patriarch. 
 
In 'I Start Over', retirement has not been living up to Big Bernie's expectations-not the expectations the television advertisements are peddling anyway. He treats himself to a souped-up 1959 Chevrolet, and this indulgence might just be what he needs to start over. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Blessed / The Fights (Storycuts)

Two short stories: a messy misadventure en route to a blood clinic brings about an epiphany; and a family visit to Knockemstiff doesn't help a new teetotaller's alcohol cravings.

In 'Blessed', a thief's career is cut short when he falls from a rooftop. Since the accident he has been subsisting on a disability cheque, a potent painkiller prescription and having his wife sell her blood. 
 
In 'The Fights', Bobby has been off the sauce for five long months. On the advice of his Alcoholics Anonymous mentor, he pays his family a visit in Knockemstiff-where even the wood smoke reminds him of whiskey. While his father and brother amuse themselves by watching pre-recorded boxing and his mother mopes in the kitchen, the inertia infusing his old home threatens to take hold. 
 
Part of the Storycuts series, these two short stories were previously published in the collection Knockemstiff.

Knockemstiff

Knockemstiff is the world of Vernon God Little by a writer who depicts poor America like no other. Donald Ray Pollock is an astonishing new voice in American fiction.

To get an idea of Donald Ray Pollock's astonishing new book, one could try to imagine a drunken punch-up between a redneck Hemingway and an amphetamine-fuelled Raymond Carver... A fiendishly enjoyable collection

Pollock's writing is lean and unflinching. His economical prose excels in its lurid (and often scatological) detail, and his physical descriptions are superb. The book is laced with dry, black humour

Like Denis Johnson, Andre Dubus and Raymond Carver before him, Pollock populates his stories with low-lives and junkies, dreamers and drunks...He is a master of voice and phrasing, and there are some knockout, pitch-perfect sentences.... Pollock treats readers to inventive, melodic and captivating storytelling. It may be as ragged as junkies' jeans, but this has the potential to be a whiskey-stained classic

The majority of the inhabitants of Knockemstiff, Ohio ... seem straight out of John Boorman's film Deliverance ... Life experience shows in this exceptional collection

What makes this an enjoyable read is Pollock's aptitude for a funny gag in the guise of amazingly inventive language

A serious, moving, funny, dark collection

KNOCKEMSTIFF by Donald Ray Pollock is the best book I have ever read. This is the America they don't let you see on television. This is real literature. It will be read for centuries

It's as if you put David Lynch, Denis Johnson, and a drunk speed freak body builder into a blender. The result are some of the darkest, wildest, most messed up, hilarious stories I've ever read. Knockemstiff is really something

Donald Ray Pollock, recipient of the 2009 PEN/Bingham Fellowship, made his literary debut in 2008 with the critically acclaimed short-story collection Knockemstiff, which was followed by the novel, The Devil All the Time. He worked as a labourer at the Mead Paper Mill in Chillicothe, Ohio, from 1973 to 2005. 
 
www.donaldraypollock.com

Blunt, brutal, but infused with a deep sympathy, Knockemstiff is a pitch-dark and hilarious collection of stories set in a tiny town in Southern Ohio. 
 
The youth of Knockemstiff grow up in the malignant shadow of their parents; raised on abuse, alcohol, drugs and cigarettes, they are stunted in every possible way: emotionally, mentally, sometimes physically. They talk a lot about escape but they never so much as cross the county line.

Donald Ray Pollock

The Heavenly Table is brilliant and unforgettable. In his trademark blend of humor and pathos, Donald Ray Pollock gives us a view into life's dark corners, without ever forgetting there is a lighter side as well

Dark, violent and funny, this book will be like nothing else you've ever read

There is something of the Coen Brothers in The Heavenly Table. This too is southern gothic… with a cast of grotesques, eccentric plot twists and humour of the blackest pitch… Pollock writes like an angel – an angel that has escaped from Knockemstiff lunatic asylum.

A tale of weird and darkly funny invention.

A blood-laced tale of three brothers who rob and kill their way across the US. [The Heavenly Table] will be a book you won’t be able to stop recommending once you’ve finished… A bit like reading Hunter S Thompson crossed with Cormac McCarthy – and a sprinkling of Nick Cave chucked in for brutal measure. It’s the kind of book you just know the Coen Brothers are itching to adapt, with its vast array of quirky characters and black humour

Donald Ray Pollock’s brilliant Western is an earthy, raunchy read – Dickensian in its rogue’s gallery of oddball characters. Full of black humour, it’s superbly constructed and written with true grit. By the end, one is left longing for more and panting for the movie that will surely come

Wild, rollicking, and wonderfully vulgar… A riotous satire that takes on our hopeless faith in modernity, along with our endless capacity for cruelty and absurd pretension.

Truly fabulous… A very wry comedy… When reviewing, I usually mark down pages with particularly well-honed phrases: I stopped doing so when reading The Heavenly Table as I probably would have bookmarked every page…Witty and expansive… I am tempted to say that anyone wanting to understand contemporary America’s political direction might be well advised to start with this novel.

A fine (and often very funny) multi-stranded yarn, set at the dawn of US involvement in WW1 with the nation on the cusp of modernity. As Tarantino's The Hateful Eight dared onscreen, The Heavenly Table lances the boil of modern America on the page.

Pollock’s freewheeling, blood-spilling story is well matched by his prose.

The darkest of Southern Noir… You’ll need a strong stomach and may want a hot shower afterward, but you’ll never forget Pollock’s compelling characters.

In a crowded room full of voices, Don Pollock’s voice is so distinct you’ll hear first and won’t ever, ever forget it. Nor will you want to. And the kicker is this: He somehow keeps getting better.

author of Poachers and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

The Heavenly Table is the latest and strongest evidence that Donald Ray Pollock is one of the most talented and original writers at work today. With uniquely vivid and graceful prose he renders a tale destined to linger in the reader’s mind, a story by turns violent and darkly amusing, and always powerful. The novel is sure to be ranked among the year’s best.

New York Times-bestselling author of Those Who Wish Me Dead

The Heavenly Table is a ferociously gothic ballad about desperate folks with improbable dreams and scant means. It is potent and chimeric, dank, violent, swamped in tragedy—and funny as hell.

author of The Maid's Version and Winter's Bone

Donald Ray Pollock is a master-worker. This great novel flows like buttermilk, so smooth and entertaining that you won't be ready for the left hook it delivers to your heart or its sophisticated moral analysis of human life. Pollock has an omniscient eye like Gogol, taking in a vast scene while spinning tales within tales. Readers will love him, writers will study him.

Full of bright-hued mayhem and scatological wit... A darkly comic gorefest by a gifted writer.

With furious prose and a Faulknerian eye for character... Pollock's gothic, relentless imagination seduces readers into a fertile time in America's history, exploring the chaos, wonder, violence, sexuality, and ambition of a nation on the cusp of modernity - and the outmoded notion of redemption in a world gone to hell.

Jauntily amoral, amusingly macabre… A beach read to enjoy on the shore of a lake of fire.

In its bloody, violent, terrible collisions, The Heavenly Table feels like Blood Meridian if Cormac McCarthy had been born with a streak of black humor in him rather than just terseness and rage.

The Heavenly Table is daft, and gruesome, and offensive, and loads of fun to read.

This is gritty western noir at its best, with impeccably placed humour and gruesome graphic scenes… Pollock writes with such fluidity and emotive intensity about his deprived and often depraved characters, about the hardship and savagery in their lives, and of their grit and determination to better themselves. They are so fabulously drawn that, at times, it feels as if the Jewett boys could just ride off the pages in a blaze of dust… it would make an excellent introduction for newcomers to the world of Mr Pollock, who is in my opinion a cracker of a storyteller.

Pollock makes you root for the three dirt-poor outlaws in this wicked world and writes like an angel – an angel that has escaped from a lunatic asylum.

This is an often violent, frequently hilarious and always engaging novel that will keep you on the edge of your seat. The text is rich with literary echoes, but Pollock’s deadpan style and imaginative daring are entirely his own.

Dark, violent and very, very funny, The Heavenly Table is part Western, part crime novel about flawed characters looking for a little bit of happiness as they hurtle into a frightening and uncertain future. It’s a brilliant mix of Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke – and there is no higher praise.

Cane, Cob and Chimney Jewett are young Georgia sharecroppers held under the thumb of their God-fearing father, Pearl. When he dies unexpectedly, they set out on horseback for Canada, robbing and looting their way to wealth and infamy. 
 
 But little goes to plan and soon they’re pursued by both the authorities and the stories emanating from their trail of destruction – making the Jewett Gang out to be the most fearsome trio of murdering bank robbers in the Midwest. The truth, though, is far more complex than the legend. And the heaven they’ve imagined may in fact be worse than the hell they sought to escape.

Donald Ray Pollock

Books by Donald Ray Pollock

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter