He lets it slip to his mother that he has fallen in love, which upsets her because she made a bargain with God that if He let her son live, she would arrange a marriage between Willard and poor Helen Hatton.Īt church one evening, we meet Brother Roy and Brother Theodore, Roy’s fat and crippled cousin.

Willard proceeds to get drunk, and his thoughts turn from the horrors of war to the beautiful waitress he just met. At home, he is met by his nervous and emotionally-damaged mother, Emma, and her brother, Uncle Earskell. There, Willard meets and instantly falls in love with a beautiful waitress, Charlotte Willoughby. The bus makes a stop at the Wooden Spoon Diner in Meade, Ohio. Willard shoots the man as an act of mercy, putting an end to his suffering. One memory haunts him in particular: that of a soldier he comes across who has been skinned and crucified. As he sits on a bus headed to his home in Coal Creek, West Virginia, he recalls the horrifying things he saw and did during the war. Willard is a young single man who has just been discharged from combat duty after the end of World War II. Part One, 'Sacrifice,' begins in 1945, before the prologue. The rest of the book is divided into seven parts. Arvin recalls his father telling him to stand up for himself, but this is easier said than done.

Feeling like an outsider at school, he is the victim of relentless bullying. While Arvin prays, however, his mind wanders and feelings of isolation bubble to the surface. Willard is borderline obsessive when it comes to prayer and expects the same from his son. He sits in a clearing with his father, Willard, on an oak log, joining him in his evening prayer routine. In a prologue, Pollock introduces the protagonist, Arvin, as a young boy. As the novel progresses the lives of these people converge in unexpected ways. The Devil All the Time follows the events and fates of various characters who all carry their own secrets from the past. A film adaptation of the same name directed by Antonio Campos and narrated by Pollock, starred Tom Holland, Sebastian Stan, Robert Pattinson and Bill Skarsgård, and was produced by Jake Gyllenhaal. Its plot follows desperate characters in post- World War II Southern Ohio and West Virginia, including a disturbed war veteran, a husband and wife who are serial killers, and a false preacher. The Devil All the Time is the debut novel by American writer Donald Ray Pollock, published in 2011 by Doubleday.

Book the devil all the time