Around the Year in 52 Books discussion

Dark and deep, this is evil at its most delicious. I've read this type of work described as country noir or the shadier hillbilly gothic and I can get with either of those genres. The Devil... is a long and wind-y tale of mostly very baaaaad characters whose lives become intertwined through their depravity. The setting is rural West Virginia and Ohio from the early 1960's through early on this century. This is one car crash you can't turn away from, with characters (a sociopathic pedophile cleric, a couple who get their kicks picking up and murdering young men, etc.) so compelling, you'll be thinking about them long after you read your last page. At least redemption and escape come to one lucky bastard, whose goodness I found myself believing in from the start.

What really got me is learning that author Pollock didn't begin his writing career until after age 50, having worked in a paper mill most of his life. Pollock was born and raised in the gobsmackingly named town of Knockemstiff, Ohio, which - sorry, Knockemstiffers -- sounds like a place where the devil himself summers each year.

Read this novel with courage and wild abandon. It was my chilling, beautiful, otherworldly pick for Week 35: a psychological thriller.