Donald Ray Pollock on his Grisly, Brilliant "Devil All the Time"

In 2008, Donald Ray Pollock broke onto the American literary scene with the darkly comic story collection “Knockemstiff,” set in a Southern Ohio hamlet, or holler, where the hardscrabble residents’ lives are plagued by drugs, despair and violence.

Pollock has just published his amazing and devastating debut novel “The Devil All the Time”(Doubleday, $26.95, 272 pp.). The book opens with the 10-year-old Arvin in 1950s Ohio, where his life is ripped apart by his mother’s death and his father’s religious breakdown. Meanwhile, Carl and Sandy are a team of husband-and-wife serial killers who pick up men on the highway, then torture, photograph and murder them. From semi-rural Ohio to the aching poverty of West Virginia, Pollock peoples his novel with religious con men, crooked sheriffs and predatory preachers. As Arvin enters manhood while navigating this corrupt world, he finds his choices are limited and brutal, forcing him to leave those he loves.

Pollock, 56, worked at the Mead paper plant for 32 years, before he entered Ohio State University’s MFA program in creative writing. Pollock spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Chillicothe, Ohio.

Q. How did you wind up writing about a husband-and-wife team of serial killers?

A. When I started the book, I had three characters. I had Sandy and Carl, and I had Arvin. I knew Arvin had to get on the road at some point. I wrote about his parents, then I quickly realized they had to die.

Q. What interested you in exploring Arvin’s father’s religious delusions that he could beat his wife’s cancer with a blood-soaked prayer log?

A. I wasn’t raised in a religious home, but a lot of people in Knockemstiff were, in a Baptist or fundamentalist way. I have always associated religion with a lot of violence. No matter what religion it is, be it Christian or Muslim, it is a great way to provide people with a moral code to live by, but there are people who twist things around. They are after money, power or land and they use violence to achieve those things.

Q. What are the ongoing influences of your childhood holler of Knockemstiff on your writing?

A. A part of it is that I’ve never moved away from here. This place is an integral part of me. I live in Chillicothe, but I am 13 miles away from Knockemstiff. At my age, I’ve probably got enough stories set around me so I can last myself out. In my writing, I’m probably not going to go any further than Southern Ohio.

I knew I had to have my own style. I wrote this story called “Bactine,” about two losers and a doughnut shop, set in Knockemstiff. I realized it was a lot better than the slop I had written in the previous two years. I knew a lot about the people in the holler from working at the paper mill, from living in Knockemstiff and from hanging out in the bars.

Q. In Donald Ray Pollock’s universe, the weak are preyed on and the abusers usually get away scot-free. How do you see the world?

A. I’ve always viewed the world as a sad and somewhat violent place. When I first started to write, someone told me, “You’ve got to have trouble.” I definitely overdo it. I know that. I am not saying that is the world is a completely negative and bad place, because it’s not. I’m actually a pretty happy person.

Q. You quit a good job and took a pay cut to go into your graduate program. How are things going as a professional writer three years after “Knockemstiff”?

A. My mill job was a union job. People make good money in the mill. It was the toughest decision in my life to leave. I had health insurance, a retirement plan, the works. It is extremely tough to make a living as a writer.

Donald Ray Pollock's Debut Story Collection, "Knockemstiff"

Stories Set in a Hard-Luck Ohio Hamlet

Donald Ray Pollock’s grimly hysterical debut story collection “Knockemstiff”(Doubleday, $23) follows the drinkers, the speed freaks, the down-and-outs and the whores of a hamlet in southern Ohio.

In Knockemstiff, the good citizens drink too much, indulge in steroids, smoke reefer and have hazardous, soulless sex in the backs of cars for the price of several amphetamine pills. The stories in this lively collection are all set in the “holler,” or hollow, of this impoverished village. In the title story, a clerk in a dead-end convenience store job muses over his stunted life as his unrequited love, the town fast girl, moves to Texas. In “Holler,” a man moves in with a local crackhead and cares for her paralyzed veteran father, giving him cheap wine to drown out his wartime nightmares. In “Blessed,” a failed burglar realizes his young son only pretends to be deaf around him. For the residents of Knockemstiff, the relationships are disposable, the criminals are petty and the thrills are short lived.

Pollock was raised in Knockemstiff, Ohio. For 32 years, he worked at a paper mill before he joined the MFA program in writing at Ohio State University. He is married with a daughter and two grandchildren. Pollock spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in Chillicothe, Ohio.

Q. What drew you to the down-and-outs of Knockemstiff?

A. As far as my interest in the down-and-outers, it’s what I gravitate to when I read myself. When I was finishing the book, somebody suggested that I put a happy story in there. I felt by that time that I would seem sort of out of place. I wound up focusing on the alcoholics and the addicted. Not everybody in Knockemstiff lived those lives. There were a lot of poor people in Knockemstiff when I was growing up, but some people like my Dad worked at the paper mill. He had a pretty decent job, and there were others that worked at the atomic plant, the VA hospital or the prison.

Q. Most of your characters were directly affected by poverty and the destructive use of sex and drugs. Were these fragments of things that you had seen or people that you knew?

A. Probably a little of both. Drinking and drugs were something that I knew from my own life. I graduated from drinking to reefer and speed. With people being trapped and all that, I knew that feeling myself. Even though I worked at the paper mill and it paid pretty good money, for a lot of years I felt pretty stuck. I know a lot of people who are like that. They are in a job that they don’t like but it pays the bills. They wish they were doing something else, but they don’t ever make that move. They may not be living the gritty life in Knockemstiff, but they are pretty dissatisfied.

Q. How did the town Knockemstiff get it’s name?

A. There are several legends on what the town’s name is based on, but there’s one that I heard when I was growing up and it stuck in my mind. The story goes that outside of a church on Sunday, the preacher heard two women fighting over one of them’s husband. One said she was going to “knock the other one stiff.”

Q. A character named Bobby appears in three stories. He starts as a seven-year-old watching his alcoholic father savagely beat a man. At the end, he is a recovering alcoholic himself in his late thirties, being taunted by his dying father. Do you think Bobby will stay on the wagon?

A. I manage to end the book, not necessarily with hope, but with the possibility that Bobby will get straightened out, if he can keep off the booze and probably stay away from some of his family. A lot of people, not just poor people, have resistance when they see family member joining a recovery group and they are still using. If their relative is in recovery, they must have a problem.

Q. After 32 years at the paper mill, did you find the Ohio State MFA program and the New York literary world a culture shock?

A. For me, in the last few years, I’ve lived a pretty good life. I screwed up a lot until I was in my thirties. Then I cleaned up and lived a pretty good life. I’m still trying to get used to this. I’d been to college because the mill paid for classes, so the MFA program wasn’t much of a surprise. I was never expecting anyone to pay any attention to my book. I’ve seen some really good books get published, then disappear. That’s just the way it is. I was expecting this to happen to my book. I thought if I could just publish a book, I’d get a job after I got out of the MFA program. I’m pretty sure success hasn’t changed me. I’m happy living where I live.

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger in April 2008)