Book & Movie Review: The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock

I did not plan on engaging in such a plethora of dark material all at once but when the podcast I was listening to weirdly synced up with the book I was reading I end up drenched in the depravity of humanity.

Let me explain:

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I started reading The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock a while back. It is a story that centers around a few characters that all have very dark secrets. Arvin is a young boy when his mother takes ill and in response, his father starts to sacrifice animals at a “prayer lob” in the woods by their house in an effort to convince God to cure his wife. He makes Arvin pray for hours into the night as loudly as possible with his knees in the bloody mud with a dead dog dangling from a tree in front of his face. This scars the child and doesn’t work. 

The next characters we meet are Sandy and Carl, who take a few weeks every summer to travel the country luring hitchhikers into their car, taking them into a secluded area to take “sexy photos” and then killing them. Carl takes the photos and Sandy acts as bait. A great deal of the story revolves around these two. The book starts in the mid-1940s when Arvin is a young boy and travels throughout the years until Arvin is about 17. 

While this tale of backwater debauchery was going on inside my head I was also listening to the Timesuck Podcast and just happened to listen to two episodes back to back that was eerily similar to the story in the book and for two weeks I was inundated with real and fictional depictions of serial killers, photographers, sexual sadists, and insanity. 

First I started listening to episode 306 entitled The Sex Slave Murders: Gerald and Charlene Gallegos. Here is the synopsis from the Timesuck Podcast Website:

As a couple, Gerald and Charlene Gallego turned their dark sexual desires into a murderous rampage that left at least ten young people dead in California, Oregon, and Nevada between 1978 and 1980. Some of these were girls as young as thirteen - barely teenagers - sexually assaulted before being murdered in a remote location. Nine women were raped before being bludgeoned or shot to death… and one man was killed for happening to be with a young woman Gerald wanted to rape and kill. Most of the victims were teens. One was pregnant. The press called the crimes “the Sex-Slave Murders.”

Imeddiately after listening to that I started listening to episode 295 entitled The Dating Game Killer. Here is the synopsis for that episode from the Timesuck podcast: 

Rodney Alcala - the Dating Game Killer.  Not as well known, but just as vicious as any other killer we've ever covered here. Between 1968 and 1979, Rodney brutally raped, tortured, and killed at least nine girls and women -  possibly over a hundred. His victims would literally be sexually tortured to death by the man they generally just thought wanted to take artsy pictures of them. Instead, he'd beat them, bite them, rape them, and strangle them until they were unconscious, and then bring them back for round after round of more sexual torture. And in the middle of his sadistic spree, he appeared on the popular TV show The Dating Game... and beat two other bachelors to win the episode's prize - a date with a single woman. She chose him. And almost immediately regretted it.

So, the story in the book was about a couple who lured people with sex, took pictures of them, and then killed them and in real life, there was a couple that did even worse things to people in the late 70’s, and early 80’s and a man who, in the early ’60s to the late ’70s, did a similar thing but added the photography thing to it. Also, I do photography and so that was a bit of a mind fuck as well. I am not sure if Donald Ray Pollock knew about these specific real-life murders and used them as inspiration for his characters in The Devil All the Time but if he didn’t I am even more taken aback at the crazy coincidences that occurred in my life while reading this book. Also, what is more, disturbing is how much worse real-life people were than anyone in this book. 

That being said, the book is written very well and the short chapters made it easy to pace myself while reading. Donald Ray Pollock does a great job of writing in a way that is subtle and relatable. His writing is down to earth and he brings the characters to life with a finesse that highlights the shared humanity that exists within us all. His characters are flawed but they have their reasons. They are broken but as we see things through their eyes we see that they aren’t oblivious to their own shattering. They are aware, if only in part, of their own weaknesses as they navigate the world with little hope of changing who they are. They are beset by the fate of their own existence and as they witness their own vices we are reminded of how we can be slaves to the momentum and luck that life throws at us. Try as we might to fight our own nature we are who we are. 

This book is not for everyone. It is a mature and dark story about corruption with a twinkle of nobility in the character of Arvin, who can’t help but do the “right thing”. Even with a past as gruesome and traumatic as his, he maintains a level of moral bravery that is commendable if not foolhardy. The book is a wicked ramp through muddy personalities and sinful activities and I recommend it thoroughly. I will watch the movie based on this book before I post this review so as to have an opportunity to add my thoughts about it but I wanted to get my thoughts about the book out before I do that. 

Also, I highly recommend the Timesuck Podcast. It is hosted by Dan Cummins and is a very well-produced audio experience. Each episode takes an in-depth look at a real-life topic in a documentary-style narrative with tons of detail and incredible humor. It is engaging, terrifying, hilarious, and has a ton of heart. This paragraph is a link to his website but you can download it however you get podcasts.

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Movie Review: I just watched the movie adaptation and it is one of the most faithful adaptations I have seen. It is obvious that they went out of their way to try to be as close to the book as possible. They use direct dialogue and only strayed from the timeline and elements from the book in small ways. They focused more on the Arvin storyline and everything else was diminished which is not the case in the book. I felt that it was the other way around where the Sandy and Carl story had the most content, and the Ray and Theodore content was a side story and the Arvin story was the one that tied everything together. This makes sense in order to make a two hour movie and it works really well. 

It is hard to imagine what it would be like to watch the movie from the perspective of someone that doesn’t know the details that are available in the book. Since I know these details I had a lot more context for things happening in the book and without that I am not sure if the movie would hit as hard. The movie is dark and the acting is very good. It is much faster paced than the book and takes out a lot of the day to day stuff that created more character development but it has the main plot points. 

I definitely recommend the book over the movie but the movie is a great synopsis of the book. If a student were to watch the movie to get away with not reading the book they would probably get away with it. Hopefully the student isn’t too young as this is a very mature and sexually explicit story.