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.

THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME by Donald Ray Pollock is one of those books that I’ve had on my wishlist/TBR for years & just never got around to. And I had absolutely no idea it had been made into a Netflix movie until the trailer dropped a few weeks ago, which was sort of the kick in the ass I needed to finally read it. I don’t have strong feelings one way or another about whether I read something before watching the adaptation…it can go either way depending on the book/movie/show, and just my mood.

But anyway. This was one I really wanted to read first, and I’m glad I did. I think my mistake was in watching the movie almost immediately after finishing the book, which has now caused a weird mashup in my mind and just…hmmm…I guess I have some feelings?

This book is tough to nail down in terms of genre, because it’s a little bit of a lot of different things. There’s certainly an element of crime fiction, as some of the main characters are literal serial killers. But the book also has this sort’ve winsome, almost romantic Americana vibe as well. And then it occasionally veers off into horror. To me, things almost felt like a super grim Joe R. Lansdale book, as directed by Quentin Tarantino.

The story bounces around quite a lot, between southern Ohio and West Virginia, and it spans quite a bit of time, from the end of WWII on up to the 60’s. While this is a pretty big ensemble story, Arvin Russell is at the center of the story. Having grown up in a household poisoned by grief & religious zealotry, Arvin grows into a young man with a pretty strong moral compass, but also with a capacity for moments of extreme violence. What he endures in his childhood is deeply upsetting, and he carries that trauma with him, always.

This book is beautifully written. It’s stark, haunting, and it is 100% not gonna be for everyone. This is a harsh, brutal story. There are glimpses of light, and there’s a certain humor to parts of the book, but this is a bleak, hard novel. I wouldn’t presume to give accurate content warnings on this, but one I would want to mention specifically is a scene where a dog gets killed. It’s actually quite a bit more deliberate & cruel in the movie than it is in the book, but it’s upsetting in both.

So, I feel a little weird commenting so much on the movie in a book review, but whatever. I think I maybe have somewhat strange expectations when it comes to adaptations, and I don’t necessarily equate a “faithful adaptation” with a “good adaptation.” They’re not always the same thing, and I think that’s really the case here.

With some exceptions regarding the structure/continuity of the story (which seems to have been done in order to introduce Robert Pattinson’s character earlier), the Netflix adaptation is extremely faithful to the novel.

Almost too faithful. Like, it felt as though the filmmakers were clinging to the novel as if it were the sacred Jedi texts or something. To the point where the movie is (in my opinion) extremely over-narrated (by the author himself, oddly), as a way of explaining things that don’t necessarily need explaining. Things that would (hopefully) just seep into the subtext of the film. Ugh. It’s certainly not a bad movie, and Tom Holland is kinda perfect as Arvin, but I don’t know. I guess for me, a good adaptation kind of takes the source material & becomes its own thing. Obviously, if you’ve never read THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME, then that’s what you’ll experience with the movie. But if you have read it, you might find the movie just feels like a weird carbon copy somehow.

Anyhow, I’ve clearly spent way too much time talking about the movie as opposed to the book, but here we are. It really is a powerful & engaging novel, crushingly dark at times, but still oddly sweet.