The devil all the time

Pollock's novel unfolds across the hills of southern Ohio and West Virginia between the close of World War II and the 1960s, and its population is an odd and unsettling mix. Willard Russell, a veteran haunted by the fighting in the Pacific, watches his wife Charlotte waste away from cancer. He believes that enough devotion, including offerings of his own blood, might spare her, and he records his prayers in a log. Elsewhere, Carl and Sandy Henderson, a married couple, drive the country's highways hunting for young women to photograph and then kill.

The story also follows Roy, a preacher who handles venomous snakes, and Theodore, his disabled sidekick, a gifted guitarist. The two are on the run from the police. Willard and Charlotte's orphaned son, Arvin Eugene Russell, moves through the lives of all these people as he grows into a man who is decent but capable of violence.

The novel is a dark, sprawling tale of faith, cruelty and fate, told through a rotating group of characters rather than a single hero. A 2020 Netflix film adaptation directed by Antonio Campos brought the story to a wider audience.