For instance, in the same diner where Willard met Charlotte, Carl Henderson (Jason Clarke) encounters Sandy (Riley Keough). Play Campos loves intertwining bliss with blood. He sets the tone early for a film whose most joyful moment is a young Arvin citing his father beating two poachers to a bloody pulp as his happiest memory with his dad. Skarsgård is unflinching in his ferocity, and his Appalachian accent suggests a man never unwound. His situation becomes so bleak he takes an unthinkable action, which results in a haunting animal death.

To avoid the inevitable, Willard resorts to God, and with his son Arvin fervently prays for divine intervention. Because after the pair marry, they produce a son named Arvin, only to have a tragedy befall them. Their courtship, which witnesses Willard’s non-secular revival, twirls another thread: Faith unhealthily filling the hole that loss leaves. When Willard returns from the war, he meets the love of his life Charlotte (Haley Bennett). The image changes the once godly soldier to religiously apathetic, but more importantly, makes apparent how closely brutality and sacrifice - exemplified through the image of Jesus tortured on the cross - align. It’s here, he discovers a bloodied, fly-infested serviceman crucified.

With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.The non-linear narrative, which explores the violent vestiges of religious iconography, finds Willard Russell (Bill Skarsgård) on the Solomon Islands during World War II. 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.ĭonald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. There's the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law.

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 sacrifi-cial blood he pours on his 'prayer log.' There's Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial kill-ers, who troll America's highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia,įollows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. With the religious and Gothic over-tones of Flannery O'Connor at her most haunting.

, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone's A dark and riveting vision of 1960s America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree.

The devil all the time pollock