LORD HEAR MY CRY, THE SUBLIME GENIUS OF DEVIL ALL THE TIME BY DONALD RAY POLLOCK

There are a number of books that I have read over the years that take all my hopes and dreams to be a great writer and curb stomp them into oblivion because of their incredible genius and lyrical artistry. SHE RIDES SHOTGUN ,DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, and DEVIL ALL THE TIME. 
  
     Devil All the Time is the debut novel from Ohio writer Donald Ray Pollock. Despite his writing making me feel like a bear trying to ride a tricycle he is also quite an inspiration. He was a mill worker and laborer until he entered a writing program at the age of 50. He might have started late but he came on the scene like a Howitzer.

  Set in post-war Ohio and West Virginia DEVIL ALL THE TIME tells it's tale in a non-linear style that shifts forward and backwards in time. It changes setting and location often and tells the story through the mouths of dozens of characters.  Characters that are vulgar, ugly , beautiful, disturbed, tragic, poor and at their core, lost. 
 
         Reading DEVIL ALL THE TIME is a like a religious experience. That's fitting because religion plays such a large role in the story. Immersing yourself in it's pages feels like some epiphany. It's like Donald Ray Pollock is Jonathon Edwards with a .45. Sinners in the hands of a crazy god who eats bugs. The fact that Pollock is able to tell this gruesome grand guignol story in such an exquisite beautiful way is demoralizing. His prose is diaphanous like a butterfly's wings if each wing was dipped in blood. 
    I read DATT in two day. I felt like  I was trapped in a fever dream. Every few pages I'd mutter
"I can't believe this."
"What the fuck."
"This is a work of art." 
I'd like to apologize to the people in Starbucks who had to hear that. 
Pollock's genius is that he never makes any moral judgments about his characters. He gives you a highly stylized incident report and leave it to you to make up your mind. Even his most abhorrent characters have enough pathos to make you feel sorry for what they have become even if you don't feel sorry for who they are. 
      It's the kind of book that you throw across the room when you're done because you know you will never ever write anything that approaches the uncommon excellence of such a book. Then if you are a stubborn person you dust yourself, you count yourself lucky that you got to experience a novel like this and then you put your butt in the chair. You use a novel like DEVIL ALL THE TIME  as a bench mark . And you do your best to reach that level. Aim for the stars you might hit the moon. 

Unbelievable

I recently watched Unbelievable, the eight-part series on Netflix.  I'm sure by now most everyone knows what it's about -- a series of rapes (a real case) that took place in Washington State and Colorado from 2008 to 2011.  The first attack involves a teenager named Marie, played by Kaitlyn Dever, who is raped in her apartment in Washington. Marie has no family and has been in the foster system her entire life, and despite some support from a couple of the foster parents she has had, has nobody truly to call her own to help see her through the rape's aftermath. Under pressure from the police, questioned repeatedly about the rape by them, doubted even by a previous foster mother who likes Marie but brings up "attention-getting" behavior she has done in the past, Marie starts to alter details about her rape story, even coming to doubt aspects of it herself.  Finally, the police investigating the case -- all male by the way, at least the lead detectives are -- wind up deciding her story isn't true and pressure her into retracting it.

Cut to three years later and a series of rapes that take place in different towns in Colorado.  Though it takes a while because different jurisdictions don't share information, detectives Karen Duvall and Grace Rasmussen wind up working together on the case, and from that point on, the episodes go back and forth between the two of them conducting their investigation and the difficult life Marie has in Washington State in the aftermath of her retraction and a charge leveled at her by the police for filing a false report.  Until nearly the very end of the series, she is not even aware that anybody else has been raped by someone using the same M.O. that he used on her and that police (with help, towards the end, from the FBI) are on the trail of the rapist.

Unbelievable is absorbing from start to finish.  Across the board, it works, the writing, the directing, the acting.  None of that is surprising when you see who worked on it: scripts by 
Susannah Grant (who did the Erin Brockovich screenplay, among others), Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman; episodes directed by Grant, TV veteran Michael Dinner, and Lisa Chodolenko (High Art, Laurel Canyon, The Kids Are Alright).  The two lead detectives are played by Merritt Wever and Toni Collette.

Seeing a series with a complicated case that spans a number of years with several victims and with two detectives on the case, it's hard to watch Unbelievable and not have True Detective cross your mind, and what I couldn't help but think is how Unbelievable is a procedural that gets its job done without the ponderousness of the HBO show.  Granted, one is fiction and one tells a true-crime tale.  True Detective is allowed stylistic flourishes (Is longeurs a better way to describe them?) that Unbelievable is not.  But what I'm getting at here is what a pleasure it is to watch a detective investigation unfold as it does in Unbelievable and not have to endure the big swings at SIGNIFICANCE that True Detective belabors you with.  The weight and shape of time, the unreliability and burden of memory -- anyone who's watched True Detective knows how hard, how very hard, that show tries.  By contrast, Unbelievable lets it significance come at you naturally, through the detailed and very specific storytelling and through what every plausible and unaffected actor in the cast brings to that story, and because of that, meaning surfaces in Unbelievable without strain.  It lets you come to it, doesn't hammer you over the head with anything.  But there's a lot going on in Unbelievable, in addition to its central core of an investigation, quite a lot, and I could watch it again for its nuances.

It's well worth the time spent with it.

Year of an Indie Writer: Week 46

by
Scott D. Parker

Well, this is the end of the second full week of November and of NaNoWriMo 2019. I don't know about everyone else doing NaNo, but I'm having a blast. I managed to stay ahead of the basic pace, getting to 25,000 words on 13 November, two days ahead of schedule.

This includes a day in which I ended up writing 1,700 words or so but only 1,200 of them counted for the full novel. Such is the unexpected pleasure of writing into the dark.

Speaking of that, one of the metaphors I've heard about writing into the dark is exploring a cave. When you get to a fork in the tunnel, you choose one and go down it. You might hit a wall, in which case you retrace your steps and then take the other tunnel.

That happened to me on Thursday. Morning session was a tad slow and it ended with a decision at the end of chapter 13. All throughout the morning at the day job, I realized the path I had gone down was blocked. Fixed it at lunch.

Non-writer folks never understand that we writers are actually thinking about the story when we're not actually writing.

The bad guy finally walked on stage in yesterday's session. I don't know much about him, but I made sure to introduce him doing bad guy things. We'll see how he ends up.

Hopefully our hero can beat the bad guy without too much trouble. Pshaw! Who am I kidding? The Hero will get a lot of things thrown at him. The fun now will be to see how he handles himself.

Not a lot of non-writing stuff this week. It's all single-minded focus. But after fifteen days of writing a new book, I am remembering just how much fun it is to write a book.

Who else is doing NaNoWriMo? How is it coming for y'all?