
“My characters are all, I guess, what you would consider working class,” he said. In addition to tapping such memories, Pollock infuses his story with the speech patterns he’s known all his life. He was yelling pretty loudly, I guess, so God could hear him.” And sometimes, if the wind was just right, we could hear him down in Knockemstiff praying. “And I can remember people saying that he went out and prayed in the woods every evening, I think after supper. “I do remember when I was a kid, up on a hill behind our house lived a very religious man who had an orchard up there,” Pollock said. Certain scenes from the book and the film take their inspiration from this place. “The Devil All the Time” is largely set in Chillicothe and the nearby town of Knockemstiff, where Pollock grew-up. “Back in the day, it was the best and biggest employer around here.” “That was a huge part of my life, not just because I worked there, but because my dad worked there, and my grandfather worked there,” he said. Pollock and his wife, Patsy, live in a big, sprawling house perched on a bluff overlooking Chillicothe, about an hour south of Columbus, and what remains of the former Mead paper mill with its iconic smokestack jutting into the sky.

From “The Devil All the Time” by Donald Ray Pollock. As far back as he could remember, it seemed that his father had fought the devil all the time.

Arvin didn't know which was worse, the drinking or the praying. Unless he had whiskey running through his veins, Willard came to the clearing every morning and evening to talk to God. Willard eased himself down on the high side of the log, and motioned for his son to kneel beside him in the dead soggy leaves. Bill Skarsgård and Michael Banks Repeta in "The Devil All the Time"
