Book tip: The Devil All the Time
Donald Ray Pollack
Doubleday
A spider-eating evangelist and his gay, crippled, blues-guitarist sidekick; a WWII veteran who bleeds out the carcasses of animals on a fetid prayer log in a plea to God to spare his terminally ill wife; the hit-man sheriff; the married couple whose vacation photo scrapbooks are stuffed with necrophiliac/torture pictures of hitchikers they've murdered on road trips; and the vet's son - who must escape this Appalachian hell before its sinister lunacy corrupts him. Dante should cut and paste the astoundingly dark and well written novel as a substitute for the seventh ring in his Inferno. It's the sort of book Cormac McCarthy would read and then (try to) sleep with a nightlight.
- RICK KOSTER
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