A Good Man Is Impossible to Find
From the opening sentences of Donald Ray Pollock’s violence-soaked first novel, “The Devil All the Time,” it’s clear that blood will out. The West Virginia and southern Ohio landscapes of this book seem riven by one long, coal-smeared and hell-harrowed gash in the earth, and the stories that vent from it file past in a crimson procession of evils so brutally creative, and so exactingly and lovingly detailed by Pollock, that over the course of the novel it becomes unclear whether they’ve been spawned for the purposes of plot or purely for atavistic pleasure.
