Willard Russell and Charlotte live in Knockemstiff, Ohio, raising Arvin Eugene as a good Christian son. Charlotte gets cancer and Willard builds a makeshift altar for god with a "prayer log" used for sacrifice in hope of curing Charlotte. However, Willard reaches his end of rope and sacrifices himself on the log after seeing no results of his worship ritual. This leaves Arvin to be orphan, and Arvin is sent to live with his grandparents back in Coal Creek. Apart from Arvin, there is a murderous photographer and his wife who do killings for their own version of distorted art, a corrupt sheriff, and a spider eating holy man wannabe with a crippled sidekick, and lecherous pastor who preys on the young congregants.
Reception
Writing for The New York Times, Josh Ritter praised the novel, describing its prose as "sickly beautiful as it is hard-boiled. 's scenes have a rare and unsettling ability to make the reader woozy, the ends of the chapters flicking like black horseflies off the page." Lisa Shea of Elle wrote that the "flawless cadence of Pollock's gorgeous shadow-and-light prose plays against the heinous acts of his sorrowful and sometimes just sorry characters." Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times praised Pollock's narrative method, writing that he "deftly shifts from one perspective to another, without any clunky transitions — the prose just moves without signal or stumble, opening up the story in new ways again and again... The Devil All the Time should cement his reputation as a significant voice in American fiction." Jeff Baker of The Oregonian noted that the novel "reads as if the love child of Flannery O'Connor| O'Connor and William Faulkner| 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." Publishers Weekly commented "If Pollock's powerful collection Knockemstiff was a punch to the jaw, his follow-up, a novel set in the violent soul-numbing towns of southern Ohio and West Virginia, feels closer to a mule's kick, and how he draws these folks and their inevitably hopeless lives without pity is what the kick's all about." The French literary publication Lire named The Devil All the Time as the best novel of the year in 2012.
The novel has been adapted into a feature film of the same name by director Antonio Campos, set to be released on Netflix, and which began filming in Alabama on February 19, 2019 and concluded on April 15, 2019. It is scheduled to be released on September 16, 2020.
