Man Fiction Weekly

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock.

Dude number 2 here.  This isn’t a review because I haven’t finished the book yet, but I wanted to talk about Donald Ray and how his fiction should strike fear in the heart of the “Quirky.”  I was talking to Dude #1 recently, mostly about how Man Fiction might be on an uptick, when I looked down to an area of carpet around my side of the bed that was covered in books I bought from the Borders good-bye and good-luck sale.  There were a couple classics that I haven’t got around to reading like Confederacy of Dunces and White Noise, but the large majority of the stack of books included newer hardcovers that I’d heard about one way or another.  I’m not ashamed to say I bought two old McSweeney’s quarterlies, the newspaper one, and the Caren Beilin one.  Then there was The Devil All the Time sitting there looking at me so mean and intense.  Its cover has an orange bloodstain dripping off a golden retriever sitting on hanging logs surrounded by crude hovering crosses.  Not that I judge books by their covers, but fuck me this is a beautiful book.  It doesn’t take long to realize that what this book is doing hasn’t been done in an honest way since Flannery O’Connor.  The only difference is that Pollock isn’t attempting some posh new form of Southern Gothic; rather, he is writing about what he knows—the land and people of rural Ohio.  Call it Middle Gothic—he will be the godfather.  He follows Knockemstiff, a collection of stories, with The Devil, this even grittier novel.  I’m halfway through it, and I couldn’t wait to write on it.  Where I grew up in South Georgia, we had Rattlesnake Baptists, Dude #3 can speak to this; however, in Ohio there are spider eating revivalists!  Need I say more?  Drop the shape-shifter chronicles, and pick up something that will put hair on your chest.