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Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

bookshelves: currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in May 2023

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Jay Woods said:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

" If you have ever traveled with family to a place called down home, you will love this book. If you like a classic tale refashioned into a modern novel that tells the same story, made more poignant by our civilization’s lack of progress, this book is If you have ever traveled with family to a place called down home, you will love this book. If you like a classic tale refashioned into a modern novel that tells the same story, made more poignant by our civilization’s lack of progress, this book is for you. If you want to know more about people and places you may only find in the statistics of tragic news stories, this book will inform you, and open your heart. It is my belief that Demon Copperhead is a masterpiece.

It may be because my grandmother was named Goldie, but called Nanna by us. Perhaps it’s due to my wife’s entire family coming from West Virginia. But every character in this story sounded like family to me. Yes, I had an Aunt Pearl and an Uncle Wayne, who was married to Colene. They lived in Louisa, KY, but I had other relatives in Hazard County. So the people in the story couldn’t be more familiar to me. The things they said and did, their peculiarities and turns of phrase were things that I knew from my childhood. Reading the book felt a lot like going home.

In the acknowledgements, Barbara Kingsolver says she is grateful to Dickens for writing David Copperfield, as a critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on young people. Although I owned a copy of that book, I never read it. Instead, Great Expectations was the book I taught, and read repeatedly. It too is a classic, and something that has seen some adaptations, most memorably in film during the 90s starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Ethan Hawke. She not only uses many of the plot points, she also uses character names-adapted, but also just taken. For instance there is the character Agnes, who becomes Angus, like the cow, and is pivotal in Damon’s (Demon’s) teen years. When Demon eventually meets his grandmother, she is raising young women that she has taken under her wing. But one man lives with her, Mr. Dick! Yes, that is also a character from David Copperfield apparently. It’s just hilarious to see a character named that way in a modern novel.

The twists and turns of the plotting in the story are incredible, and too many to go in to all of them. Suffice to say, Demon (nicknamed by the kids at school, Copperhead due to dark red hair, and light eyes, characteristic of being a “Melungeon”) is subject to the whims of the state department of social services for Lee County, VA when his mother passes away. He has close friends, including Matt of the Peggot family (nicknamed Maggot of course) and the rest of their kin. But the friends aren’t enough, or can’t take him in, and he travels through a number of foster family situations, a couple of which turn him into a revenue generating part of their group. He meets Fast Forward, the football hero, but also the leader of a group of orphans on Creaky’s Farm. Demon worships Fast Forward, and as a leader of young men, he turns the younger kids on to drugs. It’s not as if drugs haven’t been present before; drugs have been omnipresent for Demon from birth. Abuse and addiction has to start somewhere. For many people it begins with someone they think is really cool.

Much of the plotting in the story has one inescapable theme: we do a terrible job with the people suffering the most in our society. Children without parents or any reliable adults in their lives. People suffering from terrible addictions. People stricken by serious poverty. People who are victims of crime. We could do so much better, but we don’t. And things haven’t changed that much from Dickens’ time. That is the thing that is brought home by Kingsolver’s use of the Copperfield plot. We talk about it, pray about it, but we don’t do much about poverty and suffering children. We should be ashamed of this, but most folks look away.

Kingsolver brings another character in to work the theme of our inhumanity to each other. It is Mr. Golly, no doubt a malapropism of his Indian name Ghali. He runs a store at which Demon is forced to work by his foster family the McCobbs. Behind the store is a trash dump which is mined by children like Demon (and some other acquaintances) for things thrown away that still have value. The kids are described as “no touchers” by Demon in his narration, which is probably his adaptation of the term untouchables-most likely said by Mr. Ghali, which is the lowest group in India’s caste system. People so filthy that they cannot touch upper-caste people. So the clear comparison is that in a country in which the phrase “all men are created equal” (not that that was ever true) is a bedrock sentence in its Constitution, we are operating a caste system just like India! Later, as Demon reflects on his time with Mr. Ghali, he recollects that he used the word Dalit, another term for the low-caste untouchables. This is something that many might read past; it hit me hard as I was aware of the usage and context. The constructed image of America is so much greater than it actually is if you live your life in poverty in this country. The poor are mistreated worldwide. The US is no different.

I can’t possibly enumerate all of the brilliant moves made by Kingsolver in this book. But here is a short list of things I loved: the character names, the use of real places and organizations, teachers as heroes, cartoons that tell a story and have real value, strange family relationships both toxic and otherwise, Tommy’s land vs. money people idea and how it sounds like a modern conspiracy theory, and a real scenario for a descent into addiction and the consequent hell it produces (don’t love it, but I respect the way she created a realistic situation). And the phrasing and sentences she has the characters and narrator (Demon) deliver. Can’t forget that.

Even the first sentence was a gem: “First, I got myself born.” That is not a voice you hear in the city, unless it’s there temporarily, an import. Or this, by Demon, about his football coach as they are both trying to 12-step their way back to sobriety: “His mistakes were no more than the common failing to see the worth of boys like me, beyond what work can be wrung out of us by week’s end. Farm field, battlefield, football field. I have no words for that mess. But Coach and I were twelve-step brothers, there’s a code. I’d showed up.”

To create the authentic sound of the country/land language, Kingsolver did a couple of things that you often hear, but find it hard to describe. She used the apostrophe a great deal. It shortens phrases and makes sentences quicker, but also makes them sound ungrammatical, countrified. I’d, she’d, he’d, you’d instead of “you would have.” And funny but true, she uses, so. In other words, the hanging conjunction at the end of a sentence that leads into the speaker’s next thought, or encourages another speaker’s response. I opened the book and can’t find a great example right this minute, so. I even went to the internet, and like usual, it provided nothing helpful.

This is a great book that I am preparing to hand off to my wife, a Michigan born woman with parents who both hail from Huntington, West Virginia. I’m pretty sure she is going to love it, so. The apple falls straight from the tree, and I have to go steal from Peter to pay Paul, or I will have to make my bed and set to lying in it. “You lie down with snakes, you get up with the urge to bite back. All I’m saying.” ❤️ Demon Copperhead! ...more "

May 24, 2023 08:44AM · see review

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Dog Show: Poems

by Billy Collins

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Jan 05, 2026 05:55AM

Jay Woods is currently reading

A Season On The Wind: Inside the World of Spring Migration – Epic Journeys, Urgent Threats, and the Fight for Bird Conservation

by Kenn Kaufman (Goodreads Author)

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Apr 22, 2025 05:39AM

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