Stories of real devils in a real Ohio place

Knockemstiff, Ohio, the tiny hamlet that serves as the spiritual center of Donald Ray Pollock's acclaimed first novel,

The Devil All the Time

, has been compared by critics to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.

It's a world unto its own, a world vividly and powerfully brought to life by a literary stylist who packs a punch as deadly as pulp-fiction master Jim Thompson and as evocative and morally rigorous as Russell Banks.

Pollock will read Tuesday night at the Free Library of Philadelphia's Central Library in a double-bill literary event also featuring Banks, who will read from his new book, Lost Memory of Skin.

The Devil All the Time is a remarkable achievement, perhaps all the more noteworthy because its author, 56, a former paper-mill worker, didn't turn to writing until he was 45.

Unlike Anderson's imagined town and Faulkner's gothic Southern Neverwhere, Pollock's Knockemstiff is a real place. (It's 56 miles south of Columbus, in Ross County.) Pollock was born and raised there, and except for a brief stint in Florida, has remained nearby all his life. He and his third wife, Patsy, live 10 miles away, in Chillicothe.

And unlike Anderson's gentle small town, whose residents are, for the most part, good folk, the Knockemstiff we see in The Devil All the Time is a dark abyss populated by lost souls whose lives have been twisted by violence, abuse, rape, alcoholism, drug addiction, and even more violence.

"Four hundred or so people lived in Knockemstiff in 1957, nearly all of them connected by blood through one godforsaken calamity or another," Pollock writes in the opening pages, "be it lust or necessity or just plain ignorance."

Pollock's is a world forsaken by God. Spanning two decades, from 1945 to the mid-'60s, The Devil All the Time tells the interrelated stories of a handful of characters so scarred by fate they've become devils.

There's Russell Willard, a World War II veteran haunted by atrocities he witnessed and committed in the Pacific theater. A heavy drinker, he forces his young son, Arvin, to pray with him in a strange outdoor chapel, a prayer log in a nearby field surrounded by animal skeletons.

Russell prays in a desperate bid to cure his wife, Charlotte, of cancer. When that doesn't work, he begins to sacrifice animals - and eventually a man - at his crude altar.

Then there are Carl and Sandy Henderson, a couple who scrimp and save their pennies so they can take a vacation each summer - a three-week road trip during which they pick up, viciously torture, rape, and murder hitchhikers. Carl, an avid photographer, records it all with delight.

Russell's firebrand type of religion is preached by a pair of traveling preachers. One's a pedophile. Both are killers.

What a world! A soft-spoken, polite, gentle man with a slight twang, Pollock pauses when asked about the novel's bleak view of humanity.

"It's just the story that I came up with," he says, "and yeah, there is a lot of violence. . . . I guess I see the world as a sad and troubled place."

What about Arvin, whose childhood traumas would occupy a thousand episodes of Dr. Phil? Is that from experience? No, Pollock says, diffidently. "My childhood was . . . I mean it wasn't that bad," he adds in typical understatement. He does have one thing in common with Arvin: Ever since childhood he has dreamed of getting out of rural Ohio. He never did.

A high school dropout, Pollock worked for 32 years as a dump-truck driver at the local paper mill, quitting at 50 to enter a graduate writing program at Ohio State University. Along the way, he had his own demons to contend with, including alcoholism. After four stints in rehab, he has been sober since '86.

"When I turned 45 I sort of hit a wall," Pollock says in a phone interview. "I saw my dad retire from the mill that I worked at. . . . It just sort of hit me that I wanted to find something else to do with the rest of my life."

Pollock went back to school part-time in his mid-30s, and in 1994 earned a B.A. in English from Ohio University.

"I'd always been a big reader . . . so I decided, well, I was going to try to learn how to write," he says. "And that is pretty much how it started."

Pollock began by retyping Hemingway short stories to learn how they were constructed. He made the plunge and quit his job five years later when he was invited to apply to the master's of fine arts program at Ohio State University.

His first collection of short stories, Knockemstiff, was published during his second year in the program.

Pollock is taken aback by the critical acclaim.

"My life hasn't really changed all that much. . . . " he says. "Last night, I went to the high school football game.

"I pretty much live a very quiet small-town life."