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Cover of The Devil All the Time

How long does it take to read The Devil All the Time?

a novel

Donald Ray Pollock

The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock takes about 4 hours 59 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours 59 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2011. 272 pages, about 74,800 words.

10 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 8 hours 19 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 59 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 7 minutes

The page count is the median across 3 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

ABOUT THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME A dark and riveting vision of 1960s America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree. 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. 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. 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. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. 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. Donald Ray Pollock braids his plotlines into a taut narrative that will leave readers astonished and deeply moved. With his first novel, he proves himself a master storyteller in the grittiest and most uncompromising American grain.

Subjects: Fiction, general, Ohio, fiction, West virginia, fiction

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