best fiction book i've read in a long time.....

i recently finished Donald Ray Pollock's The Devil all the Time. i read a great review of it in an issue Elle Magazine months ago but forgot about it until recently when I renewed my library card. i placed it on hold at the library and because of the long hold list, finally picked it up 6 weeks later. i read the book in two days. i couldn't put it down. if you're a fan of flannery o'connor, you'll probably like this book.

i'm just going to copy the amazon.com description because i think my version wouldn't do it justice.......

Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s. There’s Willard Russell, tormented veteran of the carnage in the South Pacific, who can’t save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from an agonizing death by cancer no matter how much sacrifi­cial blood he pours on his “prayer log.” There’s Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial kill­ers, who troll America’s highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. There’s the spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick, Theodore, running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin Eugene Russell, Willard and Charlotte’s orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.

here's a great article about Donald Ray Pollock. he didn't start writing until his forties and how he came to write is really inspiring.