In what is a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” Kingsolver’s book begins and is written in the strong no-holds-barred cultural aphorisms of the rural South (reader beware) about a savvy and intelligent pre-teen boy growing up in a ramshackle trailer park with an alcoholic, drug-addicted mom and an abusive stepfather in “Right Poor” Lee County, Virginia “with kudzu hanging off the trees.” 

Here we experience the negligence and abuses of that situation until things change and the mom is placed in rehab and our central character of Demon Copperhead (his nickname from friends for his birthname of Damon, with Copperhead being a reference to his “kick ass red hair”) is farmed out (literally) to a foster home on a local farm — something I also experienced in my teens and early twenties. Here, we meet all his friends that are referred to as “The Hillbilly Squadron” and other acquaintances, all of whom have dramatic, if not outrageous, nicknames such as Wild Man, Fast-Forward, Swap-Out, Hand Biter, Maggot, Hot Sauce, U-Haul, Humvee, Hell Reeker, Extra Eye, Melungeon, Stoner. (My own nickname that was given by friends during my teens being “Steinbeck” after my favorite author John Steinbeck.) 

Out on his own with his thumb out and hitchhiking around southern Appalachia, in the first half of the book we get a displaced under-aged boy’s perspective of Kerouac’s “On the Road” and we are shuttled around to different locations in the Four Corners region of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina. (Big Stone Gap, Lurray Caverns, Natural Bridge, Cumberland Cliffs, Devil’s Bathtub, Knoxville, Johnson City, Mountain Empire Community College, Patrick Henry High) and it’s deja-vu all over again as these were all familiar places to me in my youth, including the hitch-hiking. Or as Demon says, “It hit me pretty hard, how there’s no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning. People will keep on wanting what they want, and you’re on your own.” During this on-the-road phase, Demon is seen working jobs such as in recycling trash dumps and being placed in a number of foster homes, including a short stint at his dead father’s mother’s home in none other than Murder Valley, Virginia. Ultimately, he ends up in the home of the high school football coach, where his athletic talents are noticed and he’s soon playing football for the Lee High team. 

From here we follow Demon during his high school years as something of a football star and getting the perks that come with that and his life as a foster kid living with a state champion football coach. In other words, he’s living in high cotton compared to everything in his previous experience. And the young girls are all over him and he’s taking full advantage of that for the first time in his life. He ends up falling in love, head over heels, for a slightly older girl named Dori, who is “an angel” as he calls her. And she is, as someone who is taking care of her incapacitated father and is in every way a caring and compassionate person. 

But a football injury and her father’s death change the dynamics of both their lives, and so the free rides for both of them come to an end and Demon finds himself back on his own, but now living with Dori in her father’s old house. But we’re not done yet. There is plenty of action and hard times ahead that are reminiscent of the novels of Ron Rash and David Joy and maybe not something you’d want to read if you are in a bad mood. So, hang on to your hats as Kingsolver isn’t sparing us any vacation time from her version of 21st century Southern Appalachian noir. Or as Demon says: “All we can ever be is everything we’ve been. I came from a junkie mom and foster care, briefly a star, to some degree famous because of all that. Quick to burn out, right on schedule.” 

From there to the end of the book we get more deja vu and glimpses of familiar places like Virginia Beach, Hungry Mother State Park, Richmond, and even Asheville, as Demon sorts out his life, or as he puts it: “People want to see the rest of us hurt, because they were hurting. You have to wonder how much of the whole world’s turning is fueled by that very fire.” 

While the second half of “Demon Copperhead” is definitely not for the faint of heart with hard-core drug addiction and people dying left and right, it is done so with such accuracy and grace of writing that one forges on through all of it until they are rewarded at the end with sobriety, post teen-aged success stories and with Demon’s natural drawing and graphic novel talents as a young man paying off with the offer of a book contract. In the end, it’s all about the choices we make. I’ve left out all the side stories and the details just to give you a general idea as to the map of where this story takes us — literally on the last page of the book to the Shenandoah Valley where I spent my teenage years. Deja vu again. Kingsolver’s  first-person narrative takes us deep inside Demon’s mind and emotions and despite all the four-letter words and the down and out culture he comes from, in a somewhat happy ending we come to care about him and can see why this book was nominated for and awarded the Pulitzer Prize. 

(Thomas Crowe is a regular contributor to The Smoky Mountain News and author of the multi-award-winning non-fiction nature memoir “Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods.”)