Is 'The Devil All The Time' A True Story? The Background Behind Donald Ray Pollock's Tale Of Death A

This article features The Devil All The Time spoilers. Obviously

Knockemstiff, Ohio. It’s a name that conjures images of moonshine brawls and fatal blows. There are more sinister-sounding towns in America – Tombstone, Arizona, for example, or Slaughter Beach, Delaware – but you’d still give it a wide berth on the road map. If Donald Ray Pollock’s stories are anything to go by, you’d be making a wise decision.

The 66-year-old author spent his childhood in the tiny backwater hamlet, but he dropped out of high school at 17 and drifted to nearby Chillicothe to find a job – one that would allow him to flunk about, drink beer and smoke weed. For over three decades he worked in a meatpacking plant and a paper mill, before finally deciding to pursue fiction at the age of 45. A few years later he published ‘Knockemstiff’, a critically acclaimed collection of pitch-black short stories about his infamous hometown.

preview for The Devil All The Time Official Trailer

“Knockemstiff had a reputation for being a really rough place,” Pollock told The New York Times in 2008 upon its release. “When I started writing, I took that and cranked it up a few amps.”

He returned three years later with his first full-length novel, The Devil All The Time, which was not, if you were in any doubt, an attempt to patch things up with the town’s inhabitants. “Four hundred or so people lived in Knockemstiff in 1957,” reads the book’s prologue. “Nearly all of them connected by blood through one godforsaken calamity or another, be it lust or necessity or just plain ignorance.”

Vintage The Devil All the Time

The cursed story that followed – intertwining tales of war, trauma, murder, suicide, rape, necrophilia and not much else, which critics immediately began referring to as “hillbilly gothic”, “southern gothic” and “grit lit” – has now been adapted into a feature-length Netflix movie by Christine director Antonio Campos (featuring narration from Pollock). It’s a job he didn’t take lightly. "I’m a big fan of southern gothic and noir and this was a perfect marriage of the two,” Campos told Entertainment Weekly in August. “Sometimes you might be adapting a piece and you think like, 'Well, there is a seed of a good idea here and I’ll just throw everything away and start from scratch.' In this case it was like, we love everything!”

So how much of it is based on the reality of author Donald Ray Pollock’s life, or anyone else’s for that matter? We’ve got your answers below.

Is The Devil All The Time a true story?

In short: no. But all of Donald Ray Pollock’s stories are grounded in experience, in one way or another. He recently opened up to NPR about his struggles when he first started writing. "I would try to write my own story about some East Coast suburbanite having an affair or something like that," he said. "So I did that for maybe two years or so, and it just wasn't working for me at all. Then finally I wrote a story called Back Teen. It's a very short story, and it's about these two losers sitting in a doughnut shop. And that was the first thing I had written that I thought wasn't too bad. So then I just increasingly started focusing on the people that I knew about instead of nurses, lawyers and other people I had no idea what to write about."

The Devil All The Time begins with Arvin Eugene Russell and his father, Willard (who, like Pollock, works in a meatpacking plant), as they kneel to pray in the woods. After a short time, two hunters can be heard in the distance making lewd comments about Willard’s wife, but he ignores them. In the novel Arvin takes that as a sign of weakness, until his father invites him for a drive a few days later. Willard eventually pulls up to the pair and beats them into submission – intended as a lesson for his young son: to always enact revenge, but to also wait for the right moment. (Pollock told online magazine The Nervous Breakdown that he had witnessed a beating much like that one when he was ten year’s old).

paris, france march 28 american writer donald ray pollock poses during a portrait session held on march 28, 2012 in paris, france photo by ulf andersengetty images

Ulf Andersen//Getty Images

Willard’s violence eventually extends to his own family, too, especially when he comes to believe that Arvin isn’t praying hard enough for his dying mother. In the same interview with NPR, Pollock says that Willard isn’t a reference to his own father, and neither are the damaged figures found elsewhere in his stories. Instead, they’re an amalgamation of the men he grew up around.

“I saw a lot of other fathers who were, you know, drinkers and hell-raisers, and they didn't treat their families very well,” he said. “You know, maybe they went and worked for a while until they got enough money to, you know, go on another binge or whatever and pretty much left the family to take care of themselves. So yeah, fathers have a pretty rough time in my work.”

The husband and wife serial killer characters (Carl and Sandy) seemingly aren’t based on anyone specific, but Pollock has opened up about an interest in the subject in a previous interview with Nailed.

“I can’t explain why I began writing about the serial killers. There is just something weirdly fascinating about them. I’ve said this several times, but if you have two newspaper articles on the front page, one about a serial killer and one about a kid who donates his piggy bank to the local homeless shelter or whatever, the majority of people are going to read the serial killer story first,” he said. “As for trying to block out contemporary writing and film about serial murderers, I just didn’t read or watch any of that stuff while I was working on the book (I had read some non-fiction stuff about serial killers before I started — for example, Tim Cahill’s book about John Wayne Gacy, Buried Dreams). With that said, I believe that I’m influenced by everything I come in contact with, so there’s really no way that other books and films don’t rub off to a degree.”

In the same interview, he went on to explain the source of his fiction’s general preoccupation with violence. “I suppose that I write a lot about violence now because I saw a lot of it when I was a kid. Not murder, but a couple of stabbings and quite a few fistfights, along with men abusing women, stuff like that. Because the threat of violence was always nearby, I paid a lot of attention to it, and as a result it has ended up in my work.”

When he was “in his using days” (Pollock was an alcoholic and indulged in other vices), he told The Nervous Breakdown that, “I spent a lot of time in bars and houses where it seemed, at least to me, that the threat of something bad happening was always hovering in the immediate background.”

The rest, as far as we know, is pure fiction. And all in all, Knockemstiff would have a hard time living up to Donald Ray Pollock’s grim depiction. Any town would. As he told BULL: Men’s Fiction Magazine a few years back: “I’d probably paint the friggin’ Magic Kingdom in the same way, just because of who I am. I’ve always viewed the world as a sad and often tragic place, and that tends to come out in my work.”

The Devil All The Time is on Netflix now

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