Dear Listener,

I have read my share of Cormac McCarthy, often being brought to tears by both empathy and disgust.  After I read an IndieBound synopsis that described Donald Ray Pollock’s first novel The Devil All the Time as “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,” I was pretty certain I was in for a fun ride.  (You can find the whole write-up here.)

I was not disappointed.  With the intensity and amoral grace that surrounds the book also comes a tongue-in-cheek look on human thought and emotion.  The characters tend to act more like animals than people.  So much so that the New York Times mentioned that “it becomes unclear whether they’ve been spawned for the purposes of plot or purely for atavistic pleasure.” (You can read the whole review here.)

While reading this book, I listened to a couple from Shreveport who make up the band riverwolves.  Their soft, melodic, eerie folk/rock coincides nicely with the darkness that The Devil All the Time exudes.  If interested in this unfortunately lo-fi video, you can download their two most recent albums here.

by Simon

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