From the acclaimed author of Knockemstiff —called “powerful, remarkable, exceptional” by the Los Angeles Times —comes a dark and riveting vision of America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree.

In The Devil All the Time , Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic overtones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting.

Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.

Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.

鐵杆老司機，硬派文學路——

唐納德·雷·波洛剋，1954年生，在美國南俄亥俄州一個叫諾肯斯蒂弗的小鎮裏長大，17歲從高中輟學，進入一傢肉聯廠打工，隨後的32年一直在俄亥俄州奇力科西的一傢造紙廠工作，當過壯工，乾過卡車司機。50歲那年，他被俄亥俄州立大學英語文學班錄取，隨即發錶處女作——短篇小說閤集《諾肯斯蒂弗》。2011年發錶首部長篇小說《神棄之地》。2016年7月發錶最新長篇《天堂餐桌》。2012年獲古根海姆研究基金。