'The Devil All the Time' review: Donald Ray Pollock doubles down in his latest contemporary noir

Donald Ray Pollock

Doubleday

$26.95, 261 pages

Back in 2009, when Donald Ray Pollock read from his short-story collection "Knockemstiff" at Powell's City of Books, I wrote that Pollock makes the real Ohio town of Knockemstiff sound like a "a place where Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner might have gone for a weekend tryst, a gothic funhouse full of snakes and moonshine and bologna."

Pollock also read a section from the novel he was working on, set in the same region. Now that book, "

," has been published, and it's no exaggeration to say that Pollock has doubled down on everything that made "Knockemstiff" such a weirdly compelling contemporary noir.

"The Devil All the Time" reads as if the love child of O'Connor and Faulkner was captured by Cormac McCarthy, kept in a cage out back and forced to consume nothing but onion rings, Oxycontin and Terrence Malick's "Badlands."

Notice I didn't say Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers." For all the technical wizardry in Stone's take on young murderers in love and on the run, there's little of the artistry Malick brought to his 1973 movie, also based on the Charles Starkweather case. Pollock does go over the top at times but leaves most of the gruesome stuff to the imagination and is firmly in control of his material. "Knockemstiff" had a map at the front, like the one of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, and Pollock appears determined to make a hardscrabble patch of southern Ohio his creative home turf. Characters wander from the stories to the novel, usually bringing out the worst in each other, with only the occasional grace note or flash of humor to leaven the misery.

"The Devil All the Time" starts at a prayer log in Knockemstiff, where Willard Russell makes blood sacrifices and implores God to save his cancer-ravaged wife. At his side is his son Arvin, about the only decent person in the holler. Arvin Russell learns a hard lesson early, that love and faith are no match for disease. When he leads Lee Bodecker, the local sheriff, to the prayer log, the cop is horrified and wonders what exactly he's looking at. It's a prayer log, the boy replies.

"But it don't work," Arvin tells him, in one of Pollock's many deadpan chapter endings.

Nothing and no one works in the vicinity of Knockemstiff. The sheriff's sister Sandy and her husband, Carl, are serial killers who cruise the back roads and pick up hitchhikers. They force the unlucky young men into compromising positions, using Sandy as bait, and take photographs before Carl finishes them off. It's a grossed-up variation on what Starkweather and his girlfriend Caril Fugate did in 1959, and it goes on a lot longer. Bodecker has his suspicions, but he's too busy committing crimes on the side to do much investigating.

The prayer log isn't the only religious element in "The Devil All the Time" (a title that signals which side Pollock thinks is winning the battle for his characters' souls). Arvin's grandmother Emma is a pious person; too bad those tending the flock aren't so pure of heart. Brother Roy and Brother Theodore, "nutjobs from Topperville," do a routine in which Roy preaches while Theodore accompanies him on guitar. The service reaches a crescendo when Roy dumps live spiders on his own head. Theodore, as Emma tells it, is in a wheelchair because he "drank too much strychnine or antifreeze or something is why he can't walk. It's just pitiful. Testing their faith, they call it. But that's taking things a little bit too far, the way I see it."

Roy and Theodore take things way too far and have to go on the run. They end up in a circus sideshow -- their natural habitat -- and a new preacher comes that's no better than the old ones. And on it goes.

Taking things too far is an ongoing problem for Pollock. "Knockemstiff" was a knockout debut, but a numbness set in after a few stories. "Is everyone in this town a filthy degenerate?" one Amazon reviewer asked. Just about everyone, is the answer. The novel pulls the plot strands together in a satisfying, almost redemptive way, yet it's hard to shake the feeling that too much was included for shock value, or because the author was winking while maintaining a straight face. Maybe "Natural Born Killers" is the right comparison, after all.

Reading: Pollock reads from "The Devil All the Time" at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.

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