Donald Ray Pollock shines a dark literary light on Word of South | Hinson

Donald Ray Pollock doesn’t write upbeat, sunny, and-they-lived-happily-ever-after stories.

His fiction usually focuses on the troubled souls living in the hollers around his native Knockemstiff in southern Ohio and just over the state line in a sliver of West Virginia.

The pill-popping speed freaks. The war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after he found a Marine that had been crucified alive. The charming young minister who seduces an underage girl and then acts like nothing happened when the pregnancy arrives. The serial killer who likes to photograph his grisly habit and uses his complicit wife as a lure. Not exactly Disney characters, you know.

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It helps greatly that Pollock, 67, is one of the best American writers around. His prose singes. We’re talking the same grit lit’ league that includes such authors as Harry Crews, Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy and, all the angels sing, Flannery O’Connor. Yeah, Pollock’s that good.

And he is coming to the three-day Word of South festival to read from his work and field a few questions from the audience on Saturday afternoon, April 9, in Cascades Park.

“I’ll read a bit from (my novel) ‘The Heavenly Table’ and, if I have time, maybe some from the book I’m working on now,” Pollock said via email. “I have found that most people get a little antsy or bored after listening to some yahoo read for 25 minutes, so I’ll try to keep it fairly short.”

Gothic via Southern Ohio

Pollock is probably best known for his doozy of a first novel “The Devil All the Time” in 2011. The unrelenting, hard-bitten, gory crime story – which included a dim preacher who stabbed his wife in her neck with a screwdriver because he thought she would come back to life if he prayed hard enough — was Southern Ohio Gothic galore.

As fellow Ohioan and fiction writer Mark Winegardner (“Crooked River Burning”), who now teaches at Florida State University, observed, “Anyone who fell for the ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ hype – or anyone who recoiled immediately from that book’s phoniness – ought to treat themselves to the word-drunk, 100-proof, real deal that is Donald Ray Pollock.”

“The Devil All the Time” was adapted into a 2020 Netflix film by director Antonio Campos (“Christine”). Some of the stars included Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, and Riley Keough (whose grandpappy was Elvis Presley). Pollock narrated the film. Stand back and light the fuse.

Pollock is typically modest about the film interpretation and his creative process, which he says comes to him when he sits down to write.

Toiling in South Florida, Ohio

“Well, you’re talking to someone who started out hoping to write one decent short story, so having a movie version of one of my books felt almost too good to be true,” Pollock said. “And I was blessed with having Antonio Campos as the director. He wanted to stay as true to the original story as possible. … And when you consider that he was limited to just a little over two hours running time, that was not an easy thing to do. But he did it, and I couldn’t be happier.”

The writer also added: “Writing doesn’t come easy to me, and I tend to be lazy, so I usually don’t think about the story or sentences once I call it quits for the day.”

Pollock’s now-famous origin story would make a helluva movie, too. The writer dropped out of high school in Ohio when he was a teenager. The downwardly mobile Pollock headed to Homestead, just south of Miami, where he labored at a plant nursery and helped install air conditioning.

“I don’t remember a whole lot about my time (in Florida) except that it seemed to rain every afternoon and I spent all my money at the dog track,” Pollock said.

Eventually, his father called to tell Pollock that a union job had opened at the paper mill where the old man worked in Ohio. The young son headed home and worked the next 32 years, most of the time taking care of the mill’s ash silos in the coal-burning power plant.

“It was the filthiest job in the mill, but one of the perks was that I could set my own schedule,” Pollock said.

Getting serious about writing

When Pollock’s dad retired from the paper mill and then went home to watch TV, the son, at 50, decided to get serious about this writing thing. He quit his job and headed off to study creative writing at Ohio University – Chillicothe.

“In order to get my tuition paid and receive the stipend, I had to teach a class every quarter, either English 101 or an intro course to Creative Writing,” he said. “I found out very quickly that I was the worst teacher on campus, perhaps the entire state. Still, it was great to have three years to focus on writing and not worry about the ash systems plugging up.”

The short-story collection “Knockemstiff” followed in 2008. A Guggenheim Fellowship in arrived in 2012 not long after “The Devil All the Time” hit shelves. In 2016, he published his second novel, the morbidly funny and violent “The Heavenly Table,” which might be turned into the next Campos film project or TV series. Surely, Pollock’s publishers are anxious to get their mitts on his in-the-works next novel.

“I’ve been struggling to finish another book for some time now,” Pollock said. “I probably wrote seven or eight hundred pages before I figured out the story, but now I’m hoping to finish by mid-summer. The only thing I can really tell you is that it’s set in Meade, Ohio, and one of the main characters is a schizophrenic writer.”

Wonder where he got that idea about the scribbler?

For a complete rundown of appearances by Pollock, Grammy-winning singer Rickie Lee Jones, US poet laureate Joy Harjo, filmmaker Mary Wharton and much more, visit wordofsouthfestival.com.

Mark Hinson is a former senior reporter at The Tallahassee Democrat and Tallahassee.com. He can be reached at mark.hinson59@gmail.com

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This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Donald Ray Pollock's dark literary light shines at Word of South