Devil All the Time (Pollock) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Pollock knows how to dunk readers into a scene and when to pull them out gasping, and the muscular current of each plot line exerts a continuous pull toward the engulfing falls. Important as well, and welcome, is the native intelligence he grants each of his characters. While many of them may be backwoods, none are backwards; and almost all are rich with a fatalistic humor that is often their sole redeeming feature.
Josh Ritter - New York Times


You'll want to lock your doors. Donald Ray Pollock's first novel…is pretty much what the title predicts: a literary tsunami of pure evil…The book is grotesque, violent, haunting, perverse and harrowing—and very good. You may be repelled, you may be shocked, you will almost certainly be horrified, but you will read every last word.
Robert Goolrick - Washington Post


Pollock's first novel, The Devil All the Time, should cement his reputation as a significant voice in American fiction.... [He] deftly shifts from one perspective to another, without any clunky transitions—the prose just moves without signal or stumble, opening up the story in new ways again and again...where any prime-time television show can incite nail-biting with a lurking killer, Pollock has done much more. He's layered decades of history, shown the inner thoughts of a collage of characters, and we understand how deeply violence and misfortune have settled into the bones of this place. The question is much more than whether someone will die—it is, can the cycle of bloodletting break? This applies both to the people Pollock so skillfully enlivens as it does to the place he's taken as his literary heritage.
Carolyn Kellogg - Los Angeles Times


The Devil All the Time...fulfills the promise in [Pollock's] 2008 short-story collection, Knockemstiff, named after his real-life hometown, where life as is tough as its name suggests. His fictional characters find ways to make it tougher. Devil, as violent as the bloodiest parts of the Old Testament...invites comparisons to Flannery O'Connor and Raymond Carver, who mined the grace and guilt in the hopeless lives of lost souls....But it's not so much what happens as how Pollock, with the brutal beauty of spare writing, brings it all together
Bob Minzesheimer - USA Today


As Arvin grows up—The Devil All the Time's narrative arcs from the end of World War II to the late 1960s—life's twists and turns provide him with a measure of salvation from his own past, and from the people whose soul-damaged lives Pollock has set down so indelibly on the blood-red altar of his incendiary imagination.
Lisa Shea - ELLE


(Starred review.) If Pollock’s powerful collection Knockemstiff was a punch to the jaw, his follow-up, a novel set in the violent soul-numbing towns of southern Ohio and West Virginia, feels closer to a mule’s kick, and how he draws these folks and their inevitably hopeless lives without pity is what the kick’s all about.... [H]appiness is elusive... Pollock pulls [his characters] all together, the pace relentless, and just when it seems like no one can ever catch a break, a good guy does, but not in any predictable way.
Publishers Weekly


Pollock first triumphed with his story collection, Knockemstiff, about the Midwestern town of that name where he grew up and its sad but tough residents. Here he moves on to full-length fiction with a terse examination of America's violent underbelly. Lots of in-house excitement; watch.
Library Journal


This debut novel occasionally flashes the promise that the author showed in his highly praised short-story collection, [Knockemstiff], but falls short of fulfilling it.... Set again in rural, impoverished Knockemstiff and nearby Mead, the novel opens with the relationship of young Arvin Russell and his father, Willard, a haunted World War II vet who marries a beautiful woman and then watches her die from cancer.... Though there's a hard-bitten realism to the character of Arvin, most of the [other characters] seem like gothic noir redneck caricature.... Pollock remains a singular stylist, but he has better books in him than this.
Kirkus Reviews