They also help get through tough slogs, like The Gray Man.

Turns out that audiobooks are my new god-sent, as I’ve been powering through my reading list with them. That was a great choice, as I found the narration performance really helped to drag me down into the sweat-stained, dank world that Pollock created. I started out reading the ebook, but due to life and the obsessive need to know how it ended, I switched to the audiobook. The story becomes about the flashes of memories that shaped these deplorable, sin-ridden characters and the journey that brings them to their calamitous end.Īfter all, despite the resolution, Pollock closes the novel in a way that leaves you questioning if such vicious cycles can really be so easily broken. While it hardly keeps you guessing, and I did find the convergence of the four-character threads to be entirely predictable, it’s the brutal shock factor of the small moments that really pulls you in as a reader. The presence of the other leads creates a vortex of chaos and questionable decisions around a young man who would have otherwise lived a troubled but unremarkable life.

Arvin Eugene Russell isn’t as shockingly repugnant as the rest of the leading cast, but he’s no saintly hero, either. That’s where The Devil All the Time’s best attempt at a sympathetic character comes into it. Instead of hardboiled, grisly detectives and reluctant heroes, he gave us a complex web of murderers, whores and irredeemable priests, all spreading their own wicked sickness across the people they touch. Instead of endless rain and neon lights in a city that never sleeps, Pollock gave us sweatboxes and crummy diners and backwater communities where solitude is often the best option. Pollock fleshed out this tale with all the familiar tropes of Southern Gothic and weaved it seamlessly with the dank feeling of noir hopelessness. One that, once gone, strangely makes you wonder if that taste was so bad after all while sparking a perverse craving for more. The Devil All the Time is the sort of book that leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

I wasn’t expecting much, to be honest, but came out delightfully surprised and pleasantly disturbed.

A devil all the time book