Spoilers ahead
I don’t often delve into the world of book reviews, but when something leaves me in a heightened state of emotion, I find the best resolution for myself is to blog about it.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is the story of the titular character, Demon, as he takes the blows delivered by life. A modern retelling of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (which I haven’t read), Demon Copperhead is set in a rural community in the Appalachian mountains and examines the deep-rooted problems of poverty and addiction.
Trying to decide between reading fiction and non-fiction. As usual, fiction won.
Where does the road to ruin begin?
With his father dying six months before he was born, Demon was raised in a single-wide trailer by his mother next door to his best friend, Maggot (Matt Peggot). The book begins in earnest in the late 90s when the boys are 10 years old, and the Peggot’s take Demon on two-week trip to the city. Upon their return, Demon’s mother has married her short-term boyfriend, Stoner, and he’s moved in with them.
I have my own complex feelings when it comes to being a 12-year-old boy and having a bald, tattoo-ed step-father suddenly in the picture that I don’t particularly like revisiting. Within the first 100 pages of Demon Copperhead, I was mad. I had such rage and fury inside my soul at Stoner, and how he showed up and upended Demon’s entire life. His bullshit alpha-dog, macho, ‘my way or the highway’ stance, his proclivity to teach with his fists, his verbal and emotional abuse, I was furious. When he for no real reason banned Demon from seeing Maggot, to standing over the boy and forcing him to scrub the floors several times over while inhaling cleaning fumes for mindlessly tracking in mud, I wanted pain to come to Stoner.
Further to the abuse of a man to a child, Demon Copperhead tells the story of Maggot’s mother, and why she’s in jail. Another horrific, awful tale of cold-blooded abuse and trauma. This was not a good tale to read while I was holding my 3-month-old son.
Demon’s mother was characterised as being an on-the-wagon, off-the-wagon type of person. She’d be sober for months to years until something slipped, and she ended up back in the throes of addiction. One day, Stoner busts into Demon’s room and says “Your mom wants to show you how much she loves you”, then has Demon help his overdosing mother. Fighting tooth and nail against calling 911, until they show up, then he’s the dutiful husband. Scum.
This event lands Demon in foster care, working the tobacco fields for a crusty old farmer. Demon’s mom goes into rehab and things seem to be going well until, on Demon’s birthday, his caseworker informs him that his mother has OD’d on Oxy. Stoner ghosts, and Demon, is left to the state.
At this point, my rage had boiled up into a fire, I wanted divine retribution against Stoner. I didn’t want Demon to get his hands dirty, nothing short of the divine hand of God, personally smiting Stoner from His green Earth would satisfy me. Alas, that’s not how life works. Stoner gets a fresh start, and Demon bounces between foster houses.
Burnout
The rest of the book is life happening to Demon. He’s a naïve child, but has a strong sense of what is right and wrong. A foster family moves out of state, leaving him behind, he chooses to track down a long-lost relative who finds him a place to live. He takes up Football, ends up being a rising star for the team, he’s pegged as a gifted person, albeit behind due to his foster care’s lack of care. He’s popular, but never loses the sense of inferiority that comes from sleeping behind dumpsters. He’s keenly aware that at any moment, life can get rattled and everything can get snatched away from you, and he’s insular. He refuses to rely on others and knows that he can only stand on his own two feet.
Then a football injury destroys his knee. The whole back half of the book is Demon, falling into the rabbit hole of pain medication and the addiction therein. It seems like everyone in the county is on something, whether it’s Percocets, Oxy, blow, or something else. Demon flunks out of high school, moves in with his girlfriend, Dori, after she loses her father, and the two teen addicts take a stab at playing house. Demon, for all his worth, tries to keep it together, despite the addiction. Unfortunately, and predictably, Dori OD’s and passes away herself. Several characters turn up broken by addiction, other characters die, not necessarily due to someone’s malice, but more thanks to the cruel twists of fate, and Demon eventually finds his way into rehab and gets clean.
In the final chapters, Demon returns to the county and touches all the places that were home to him. He’s duller now, damaged goods. But he’s alive, and that’s something. He revisits several locations and reminisces about how he sheltered in a barn overnight here, and how he was robbed by a hooker over there. These places are quiet now. These places that were so influential and formative are now just, sad, empty, derelict buildings.
The images along the cover are a lot more poignant after you’ve read the book
As I alluded to above, the first 100 pages made me angry. The next 450 pages just made me sad. I sit here with the novel concluded, feeling like a pile of ash. Everything has been burned up, and for a glorious moment, we were alive and bright. Now, it’s destroyed. Gone.
Life doesn’t conclude in neat little bows, and not every storyline gets the ending it deserves. And in this, I feel Demon Copperhead does a pretty good job of emulating that structure. I’m used to fiction having a dramatic climax and resolution, but Demon’s story didn’t really have that. It was like a boot in a tumble dryer, a constant hum accompanied by random bangs, as the shoe hits the walls. The hits of life keep coming, then they ebb for a season, then another tragedy befalls our hero. At the very end of the book, he rides off into the sunset, leaving his county behind. The ending didn’t make me feel good, or resolve any feelings that I had in my soul, some of the characters that I wanted to see more of didn’t return, but it didn’t end in a tragedy. Demon keeps living, when so many others don’t.
Demon Copperhead was a very good read. Emotional, personal, and brilliantly written. I’m amazed that Barbara Kingsolver can write from a perspective that seems entirely outside of her own. It’s intimate, dark, and beautiful. If you can stomach the tragedy that is the opioid crisis, the failures of the foster care system, and the pain that humans inflict upon each other, I highly recommend Demon Copperhead. It’s only March, but I’m almost sure this is going to be my favourite book of this year.
