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He yawned and took a swig from a bottle of pink medicine he kept on the dashboard. He wished he could have a cup of coffee, but his ulcer was acting up again. The bus driver, a soft, sawed-off man who wore elevated shoes and a limp bow tie, pulled in the alley beside the depot and announced a forty-minute break. Strangers complained about the stench, but the locals liked to brag that it was the sweet smell of money.

The Greyhound made its regular stop in Meade, Ohio, a little paper-mill town an hour south of Columbus that smelled like rotten eggs. With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.It was a Wednesday afternoon in the fall of 1945, not long after the war had ended. Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte's orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right. There's the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. There's Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can't save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrifi­cial blood he pours on his "prayer log." There's Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial kill­ers, who troll America's highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic over­tones of Flannery O'Connor at her most haunting. From the acclaimed author of Knockemstiff -called "powerful, remarkable, exceptional" by the Los Angeles Times -comes a dark and riveting vision of America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree.