I've been meaning to read something by Donald Ray Pollock for awhile, so I picked up the newly released paperback edition of The Devil All the Time the other day. Here's a blurb on the back from Jeff Baker of the Oregonian:

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.

Weirdly, I kind of don't want to read the novel anymore, just because I don't want to ruin the perfection of Baker's image.

Anthony Domestico is chair of the English and Global Literatures Department at Purchase College, and a frequent contributor to Commonweal. His book Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period is available from Johns Hopkins University Press.

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