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‘Demon Copperhead’ Review: A Heart-Wrenching Portrait of the Opioid Crisis

“They did this to you.” Other characters drill this assuration into the mind of Demon, the main character of Barbara Kingsolver’s newest novel, “Demon Copperhead.” The book, set in a poor county in southern Appalachia during the opioid epidemic, deals with the large question of who is to blame for a crisis. Kingsolver uses the perspective of a young boy to showcase the true parties at fault in rural America, including the institutional structures that ruin lives, corrupt children, and send communities into cycles of ruin. Inspired by the sweeping narrative of Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield,'' Kingsolver uses compelling characters and an underrepresented setting to create a heart-wrenching portrait of the American opioid crisis.

Demon Copperhead — his first name a twist on “Damon,” his last name owed to the red hair he inherited from his father — has a lot of troubles. From the beginning, though, he takes responsibility for his entire life. The novel starts with the words, “First, I got myself born,” and from there Demon faces a variety of harrowing childhood experiences, including an opioid-addicted mother, an abusive stepfather, intense grief, child labor, and negligent guardianship. The responsibility that he takes for matters outside of his control makes readers immediately sympathetic for Demon. His resilience is repeatedly put on display, even as the mental scars of trauma start to weigh down upon him. Demon briefly rises from his troubles to become a star on his local football team — but this respite is interrupted by a devastating injury. This leads to Demon’s first use of opioids, and then the novel follows the arc of his life after this dreaded introduction.

This novel draws upon both current problems in Appalachia and the way that Dickens brought the lives of the trodden-down into public consciousness. Kingsolver, known for her acclaimed novel “The Poisonwood Bible,” was raised in rural Kentucky. There, she saw the effects of the opioid crisis in Appalachia first-hand. After visiting Charles Dickens’s home in England, Kingsolver was inspired by his “impassioned critique of institutional poverty” and decided to tackle modern American problems in a similar fashion. Her novel is just as eye-opening about the opioid epidemic as Dickens’s stories were for Victorian readers. Kingsolver’s deep admiration for Dickens shines throughout the novel; she refers to him as her “genius friend in the Acknowledgements. Even Demon compliments Dickens directly: “Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.”

Kingsolver reflects Dickens in other ways, too: Just as some people turn away from Dickens’s notoriously lengthy tales, the page count of “Demon Copperhead” — nearly 550 pages — has the potential to daunt readers. This is not without reason; books that reach this length often contain tangents that strike fast-paced readers as unnecessary. Sometimes the novel gets stuck in a “rinse and repeat” storyline, in which Demon escapes some form of torturous supervision just to get trapped in another. However, this torrent of misery is an effective way to emphasize the many obstacles that the people of Appalachia faced during the opioid crisis: a never-ending stream of misfortune that seemed inescapable.

The novel focuses on Demon, but it also features the strong women who shape his life. Although his mother’s addiction negatively impacts Demon, her love always stays with him. Other female influences in his life include Mrs. Peggot, his elderly neighbor who helps care for him when his mother is distracted, and June, another Peggot relative that becomes a guiding light in Demon’s life after he tunnels into addiction. Kingsolver crafts the Peggot women as the embodiment of resilience and kindness amidst the crisis. There are more amazing female characters, but the one that shines is Angus, Demon’s foster sister. Angus defies expectations of both Applachian and female stereotypes, and is one of the only characters that truly recognizes how much Demon has gone through. Kingsolver’s strong female characters show the especially intense struggles that women underwent during the opioid crisis — forced to face the dangers of addiction while often being put into roles in which they had to care for others.

The novel also stands against stereotypes of rural Americans — Demon often remarks that city people don’t understand Appalachian life. He begins to see how his county has been systematically ignored throughout the crisis and the way that opioids were peddled recklessly to vulnerable community members. Demon is able to survive the institutions that worked against him — but he also acknowledges that so many lives were not adequately protected. Kingsolver reveals the humanity behind the numbers of the crisis and the stereotypes that prevented help from coming to the places that needed it the most.

Overall, the novel has the potential to open the eyes of many Americans that have been sheltered from the opioid crisis, whether they were oblivious to its toll on rural areas or are too young to remember its significance and the scars that it has inflicted on some of our country’s most defenseless groups. The dreary subject matter will not be for everyone, and those afraid of lengthy novels may be intimidated, but “Demon Copperhead” is an odyssey not to miss. It highlights the resilience and strength that can grow from some of the world’s darkest places, and reminds us not to ignore and belittle those who have grown up in a world that works against them.

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Appalachian survival: ‘Demon Copperhead’ is a riveting, epic tale

Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead” re-imagines Dickens’ “David Copperfield” as a story of survival set in the Appalachian Mountains.

• By Joan Gaylord Contributor

October 25, 2022

Bestselling novelist Barbara Kingsolver opens her latest release, “Demon Copperhead,” with a quote from Charles Dickens: “It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.”

Taken from Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” the quote might be viewed as a challenge: Kingsolver does recall the past as she gives us a contemporary retelling of Dickens’ 19th-century classic. Hers is another story about a boy who struggles against unimaginable odds in the midst of a community that regularly fails him, a boy who not only survives but achieves a measure of success. But rather than Victorian England, Kingsolver sets her tale in contemporary Appalachia.

One needn’t have read Dickens to appreciate Kingsolver’s novel, as the book stands well on its own. But with each unfolding chapter, the connection between the two brings home the fact that, more than 150 years later, there are still clever, self-reliant young people who must defy their circumstances simply to live. Kingsolver’s dedication in the book reads: “For the survivors.”

Damon Fields, aka “Demon Copperhead,” is one of these children, and he provides the eloquent and frequently humorous voice of this story. Copperhead refers to his flaming red hair, which is about the only thing his father gave him. The man was long gone before the boy was born. Damon lives with his drug-addicted mother in a single-wide trailer owned by the Peggot family, who lives across the road. 

Motherly Mrs. Peggot keeps an eye on things at the trailer, knowing, as she does, that Damon’s mother isn’t capable of taking care of herself, let alone a child. From too young an age, Damon realizes this, too. But the Peggots provide Damon with a kind of extended family, offering acceptance and even affection to a boy who longs to be loved. They generously share what they have while they navigate their own challenges. But this is Lee County, Virginia. It is home. As Damon observes, “Most families would sooner forgive you for going to prison than for moving out of Lee County.” 

On his 11th birthday, Damon’s mother dies of an overdose, which sends the grieving boy into Lee County’s woefully inadequate foster care system. As this is tobacco country, orphaned boys are viewed by some foster parents as free labor that comes with a monthly stipend from the county. The social workers responsible for the children’s welfare lack the necessary resources and, though they care, are simply not up to the task. Ever the survivor, Damon and the other boys learn to rely on one another. “We were our own messed-up little tribe,” he observes. 

Undeniably, the book can be challenging to read and, frankly, it is not going to suit everyone. Aside from the profanity and compromising situations, it depicts heartbreaking circumstances imposed upon people already beset by severe challenges. It tells of children neglected by the families who are supposed to love them and failed by the agencies that are supposed to protect them, of too many lives lost to the opioids that flood the region.

Yet, in the midst of this heartache, we meet people whose talents and abilities allow them to reach beyond expectations. Their individuality lifts them above their circumstances. The love expressed by family and those who look upon one another as family is sometimes enough to sustain people. And there is a pride of place, a sense of belonging, and a strength that comes with community. 

Kingsolver, who grew up in Kentucky and currently lives in the mountains of Southwest Virginia, gives the community a voice as she infuses the bleak tale with a depth that brings warmth, humor, and dignity to the characters. She empowers them to speak for themselves as she illuminates the motives and goals that allow some to succeed while others perish.

For many readers, sticking with the book is time well spent: Her exquisite writing takes a wrenching story and makes it worthwhile. The details are difficult, but they are never gratuitous. She thrusts the reader into the midst of real-world circumstances – especially the opioid epidemic – and she compassionately demands that we not look away. 

That inclination to turn away, of course, is one of the reasons that many of these societal problems endure. After all, this is a modern take on a novel written over 150 years ago. “Demon Copperhead” begins with an admonition to use the story to influence the present. Kingsolver has given us a superb novel; what we do with its insights she leaves to each of us to decide.

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Review when everything breaks down, what does it take to survive, review a voice that wouldn’t be ignored: nellie bly and the pursuit of truth, review no one was telling the stories of rural women. so she did., share this article.

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Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver review – Appalachian saga in the spirit of Dickens

The novelist’s take on David Copperfield is a bold, heartbreakingly evocative tale rooted in America’s opioids crisis

L ast year in the US, opioids were involved in more than 80,000 overdose deaths, representing yet another hike in an epidemic that began in the mid-1990s and shows no signs of abating . Fury at the now well-documented role big pharma played in its creation ripples through Barbara Kingsolver ’s charged new novel, a hillbilly coming-of-age saga that seizes from its opening line.

“First, I got myself born,” announces its protagonist, Damon Fields – no mean feat given that his addict mother, little more than a child herself, is lying passed out among her pill bottles in a trailer home in Lee County, Virginia.

He grows into a wild boy with red hair inherited from the dead father he never knew, and before long the nickname “Demon Copperhead” has stuck. “You can’t deny, it’s got a power to it,” he observes, and so does his voice, summoning in its singularity the likes of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield while hailing from a very different demographic.

For this is a novel that testifies to the experience of some of the earliest casualties of the opioid crisis, in particular the hollowed-out communities of Appalachian America, who tend to feature in the wider culture solely as the butt of jokes – they’re moonshiners, hicks, rednecks. It’s an intensely personal mission for Kingsolver, who grew up in Kentucky versed in a language that, as she puts it in her acknowledgments, “my years outside of Appalachia tried to shame from my tongue”.

Her boy hero spends his earliest days inseparable from his best friend, “Maggot”, playing in the woods and messing around in creeks lined with mud “that made you feel rich – leaf smelling, thick, of a colour that you wanted to eat”.

They’re ragged, hungry kids for whom Bible stories are as fanciful as superhero comics, so nature provides just about the only salvation going, despite rumours of venomous copperhead snakes locally. Demon will need every lungful of green air that he can get because a thug of a stepfather is about to overturn his world, and a stolen OxyContin prescription will knock his mother off the wagon soon after.

Dire experiences in the “foster factory” follow, compelling Demon to track down a long-lost grandmother who persuades the local high-school football coach to take him in. He becomes a star player, but his tale’s linguistic dynamism is up against the dogged fatalism of its plot, and when he’s injured in a game and the pain pills are doled out, a sorry outcome surely looms.

With its bold reversals of fate and flamboyant cast, this is storytelling on a grand scale – Dickensian, you might say, and Kingsolver does indeed describe Demon Copperhead as a contemporary adaptation of David Copperfield . That novel provides her epigraph: “It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.”

The words signal Kingsolver’s avowedly political intent as an author – one that smothered the creativity of her last novel, 2018’s Unsheltered , but is for the most part more subtly integrated here despite the book’s long list of righteous campaigns. They crystallise, too, Demon’s quest: still barely into adulthood by the novel’s close, he has been trying to pinpoint where things started to fall apart for him.

Should he even be held accountable for bad choices after the start he had? Maggot’s Aunt June, a homecoming queen turned crusading nurse, insists not, but as Demon discovers, owning his story – every part of it – and finding a way to tell it is how he’ll wrest some control over his life. And what a story it is: acute, impassioned, heartbreakingly evocative, told by a narrator who’s a product of multiple failed systems, yes, but also of a deep rural landscape with its own sustaining traditions.

• Barbara Kingsolver
• The Observer
• Opioids crisis
• Charles Dickens

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DEMON COPPERHEAD

by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

Inspired by David Copperfield , Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.

It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922

Page Count: 560

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Barbara Kingsolver

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

PERSPECTIVES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

IT STARTS WITH US

by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.

The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.

Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.

ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022

ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE | GENERAL FICTION

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by Colleen Hoover

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Review: 'demon copperhead,' by barbara kingsolver.

The lure of Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel begins with its title: "Demon Copperhead." What, now?

This sprawling, brilliant story, set in southwestern Virginia's impoverished Lee County in the 1990s and early 2000s, is a modern retelling of "David Copperfield."

You don't need to have read Charles Dickens' masterpiece to appreciate Kingsolver's work, but some familiarity will add to the appreciation: OMG, is that nasty U-Haul guy really Uriah Heep? Is fragile little addict Dori based on Dora? If so, she's doomed!

Demon Copperhead, birth name Damon Fields, is a green-eyed, red-haired lad born on the grimy floor of a trailer to a doomed teenage addict. Schoolkids twist his first name into "Demon," his last name into that of the lethal snake.

Demon Copperhead narrates his own story in a witty cadence. His early childhood is shaped by his childlike mother, who is either out-of-her-mind high or in rehab; his saving grace is the nearby Peggot family, whose elders shower him with kindness.

When his mother dies, Demon lands in the foster home from hell, a foul farm whose owner uses several "sons" as slave labor. There Demon meets the enigmatic teenager Fast-Forward, a hero to all who know him, especially the young women — until he betrays them like the smooth snake he is.

As he enters his teen years, Demon's fortunes turn — he is taken in by relatives of his dead father who give him food, shelter and love. He becomes a high school football star and a magnet to many a teenage girl.

After a knee injury, he becomes addicted to painkillers. Most of his story is about his struggle with addiction, along with the similar nightmares faced by his friends and enemies.

"What's an oxy, I'd asked," Demon writes. "OxyContin, God's gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance."

Despite its bulk — almost 600 pages — "Demon Copperhead" is a page-turner, and Kingsolver's best novel by far. That's saying something — she's written many brilliant ones, including "The Poisonwood Bible" and "Flight Behavior."

This novel's oomph lies in its narration — a taut, witty telling by Damon, long grown, about his mine-laden youth.

Its only flaw also lies in that narration, when Kingsolver wanders off from the story at hand to lay out long, didactic sermons about what is wrong with America today.

It's not that she isn't right. But if we're reading Demon Copperhead's account of troubles at his high school when some teenagers drive a pickup flying a Confederate flag past a Black teacher, we get that that's racist, and why — Demon tells that story well, but then we read on and suddenly we're not reading Demon, but Barbara Kingsolver.

And yet, there is less of that flawed Kingsolver veering than usual in this novel. For the most part, the writing is fine, so much so that you'll stop to reread some parts aloud, just to salute them.

Kingsolver has some of Mark Twain in her, along with 21 st -century gifts of her own. More than ever, she is our literary mirror and window. May this novel be widely read and championed.

Pamela Miller is a retired Star Tribune night metro editor. She lives in Old Frontenac, Minn., and can be reached at [email protected].

Demon Copperhead

By: Barbara Kingsolver.

Publisher: Harper, 560 pages, $29.99.

Pam Miller is one of two night metro editors for the Star Tribune. In her 30 years at the paper, she has also worked as a copy editor, reporter and West Metro Team editor.

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Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver review — when David Copperfield got hooked on hillbilly heroin

David Copperfield is great in so many ways. The almost experimental passages where David recreates his earliest memories; the unforgettable villains Mr Murdstone and Uriah Heep; the melancholy motif of paths not taken, that “things that never happen” are “often as much realities” as those that do; and one of the best and funniest depictions of being black-out drunk in English fiction. (“Somebody fell, and rolled down,” says David. “Somebody else said it was Copperfield. I was angry at that false report, until, finding myself on my back in the passage, I began to think there might be some foundation for it.”)

Barbara Kingsolver was drawn to the novel for a different reason. In her view, Charles Dickens’s mid-career masterpiece is primarily an “impassioned critique

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Book Review :: Demon Copperhead

Who knew a tale spun out of the Appalachian addiction-stricken poverty could contain such beauty in language, but that’s what we have with Demon Copperhead . Barbara Kingsolver’s latest tome is a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield . And while I haven’t read the Dickens’ classic, what I know of his writings on orphans and the systemic issues that plague them, Kingsolver selected a sadly appropriate environment to transport her re-creation.

She’s a master at language, setting and characters that wrench your heart out. And lest my review not be clear, this is easily the best book I read in 2022. (I had to check the date I finished this one , which was in December 2021.)

Summary of Demon Copperhead

Told in first person, Demon Copperhead – a nickname based on his given name of Damon and his flaming red hair – escorts readers through his life. From the difficulty of getting born to an addicted mother, navigating abusive foster situations, to devising survival routes at any cost, Demon is growing up and trying to finagle ways to capitalize on any opportunity that he’s given.

His father died before he was born, but not so early as to miss telling Demon’s paternal grandmother. Their presence in his early life is more myth than anything. However, when Demon finds himself out of options, he goes in search of this last relation, hoping she’ll offer some consideration to her child’s son.

Over and over, Demon has to put his last chip on the table and pray the house doesn’t win. Despite constant self-doubt, Demon ultimately has to bet on himself and an innate talent for drawing human likenesses which he’s continually fostered.

Reading Experience

I listened to Demon Copperhead as an audio book, but like Poisenwood Bible , I was struck by Kingsolver’s ability to turn a phrase and create such beauty from language. Had I physically read it, there would likely be examples in quotes and passages included in this review. As it is, you’ll have to trust me.

In addition to the language, Kingsolver creates incredibly memorable personalities. Aside from the title character and perhaps another nod to Dickens’, there are people you know and others you hope you never know, but understand are all too real.

As I mentioned, I haven’t read David Copperfield , but I plan to solve that fairly soon. And, I look forward to rereading – this time physically – Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead , knowing that the two together will be an even richer reading experience.

Avid readers will love this tale, and I expect this to be a favorite among book clubs in the coming year.

Book Club Prompts

If you’ve read David Copperfield (or given what you know of…), how are the books similar or different?

There’s a promise spoken over Demon when he’s born. How does that promise come into play throughout Demon’s life?

Demon experiences several “families.” How does each one contribute to his survival?

Where do institutions or government systems help or fail Demon?

Other than Demon, who is your favorite character and why?

Appalachia literature that features rampant drug abuse and poverty has suffered criticism in recent years. How do you think those critics will respond to Demon Copperhead ?

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Thoughts on books, reading, and life

Review: Demon Copperhead

Demon Copperhead , Barbara Kingsolver. New York: Harper Collins, 2022.

Summary: An adaptation of the David Copperfield story set in rural western Virginia, centering on a child, Demon Copperfield, raised by a single mom until she dies, the abuses of foster care he suffers, and after a football injury, the black hole of opioid addiction.

I’ll give you my opinion of this book up front. For me, this is one of the best, perhaps the best novel I’ve read this decade. It seems well-warranted that Kingsolver received a Pulitzer Prize for this book as well as its being an Oprah’s Book Club choice in 2022. Kingsolver worked off of good material, adapting Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield to a story about a child in rural western Virginia, raised in the foster system, then succumbing to opioid addiction after a high school football injury.

Demon Copperhead got his name from his father, Damon Copperhead, who died before he was born in a swimming hole accident at the Devil’s Bathtub, a place that will haunt Demon throughout this story. His mother, an alcoholic and drug addict attempts to raise him, complicated by an abusive step-father. During an overdose, Demon gets his first exposure to the foster system, with social workers either blind or indifferent to the abuses of foster care givers in rural Lee County. At his first placement, Creeky’s Farm, he is basically seasonal farm labor, poorly fed and housed–a theme running throughout. Survival involves the other boys with whom he shares this placement. One, who becomes a long-term friend, Tommy, is comforted by comics Demon draws for him that makes him into a super-hero. The other, the oldest, who dominates this group by charisma and force is Fast Forward, high school star quarterback. Others do his bidding, and sometimes bear the brunt of his mistakes. It’s here that Demon is introduced to “pharm parties” and the prevalence of drugs circulating throughout Lee County, drugs that would soon take his mother’s life.

After that the foster world is his life, with no hope of escape. Another placement results in underage work sifting garbage for a storeowner fronting a meth lab. He literally escapes this by running away in search of a grandmother he’s never met in Tennessee, who helps wayward girls and who determines to make an exception and help him both financially and by using connections to find him a placement with Coach Winfield, a high school football coach, back in Lee County.

The grandmother is not the first to notice a resilience in Demon, that he is more than the “trailer trash” he thinks of himself as being. He grew up with the Peggott family including “Aunt June” Peggott, a nurse practitioner with a drop-dead beautiful daughter Emmy. They eventually returns from Nashville to Lee County, where June works as a nurse practitioner, on the front line of a rising opioid epidemic. Coach Winfield offers him the first decent home he has lived in, decent clothes, food, and more. Coach has a daughter, Angus (a play on Agnes, her actual name), who pretends to be a boy when first encountering Demon. She certainly is a maverick among all the girls he’s met, the closest thing to a sister that he has had who can talk with about his life, an utter straight shooter, and a non-conformist in the local culture. He also meets an art teacher, Miss Annie, who encourages his talent, trying to convince Demon that he has something special.

Coach recognizes that Demon has the talent to be a stellar tight end, big and fast with good hands. Eventually he plays on the high school team, becomes a chick magnet, until a knee injury puts an end to all that. Pain-killing drugs prescribed by the team doctor who also runs the town’s “pill mill” turns a boy already introduced to drugs into an opioid addict, sending him into a deep spiral along with his addict girlfriend Dori. June Peggott, who has been crusading against the companies flooding her community with these drugs tries and fails to help. In fact, her own daughter Emmy is swept up in drug trafficking by Fast Forward.

Kingsolver traces the heart-breaking descent of Dori and Demon, dropouts living together on love and drugs, going through a series of jobs lost, and the desperate quest for the next fix. Demon has been a resilient survivor with a gift, but will it be enough? Will those who see what Demon could become be able to help?

Kingsolver offers a compelling commentary on the failings of the foster care system and the tragedy of drug companies who targeted rural communities to make a “killing” by persuading doctors to prescribe their product to all those suffering pain from age, work injuries, or sports, or just the pain of life. From Demon’s mother to friends, Demon sees death all around him. Will this be his end?

But the other side of this story is the fabric of community, the “people capital” of these rural communities, who do the best that people can do. Loyalties–to family, to one’s buddies, like Tommy or the Peggott’s son Maggot, and in Demon’s case, to Dori even as she descends into addiction hell is another part of this story. We meet characters from Aunt June to Angusj to Annie and her husband, who show tough love without becoming co-dependent or enabling.

Finally, in the character and voice of Demon, Kingsolver has given us a narrator whose story is as compelling in a rural American setting as David Copperfield was in the urban poverty of Dickensian England. We hear the combination of self-doubt from all the destructive messages and personal failures, and the determination that burns within, and we keep reading to find out which will win out in the end.

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Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver: An ode to Dickens, but with a contemporary edge

Two central elements of this novel are familiar, yet the author’s lively style makes the whole thing feel fresh.

The setting for Barbara Kingsolver's novel is Lee County, Virginia, 'world capital of the lose-lose situation'. File photograph: New York Times

Charles Dickens’s “favourite child” among his novels was David Copperfield, the quasi-autobiographical story of an impoverished child done good amid the stratified class system of Victorian England. In her 10th novel, Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver grafts this tale on to the equally stratified milieu of 1990s and 2000s America.

The setting is Lee County, Virginia, “world capital of the lose-lose situation”. Readers might also recognise it as the setting of Beth Macy’s book turned TV series Dopesick (2018), which charted the campaign by Big Pharma to get working-class Americans hooked on prescription opioids. The resulting opioid crisis has also been extensively documented in books like Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain (2021).

So, the two central elements of Demon Copperhead are familiar, yet Kingsolver’s rich and lively style makes the whole thing feel fresh.

Damon Fields, aka Demon Copperhead, is born to a mother who is “let’s just say out of it” and a father who is already deceased. By the time he’s 11, he has endured the wrath of a cruel stepfather, and his mother has died of an overdose. “At the time, I thought my life couldn’t get any worse,” he says. “Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.” So, we see him dragged through a broken foster system, labelled untouchable by peers, cowed by labour, hunger and addiction. Apart from a brief high as a college football star, he’s constantly learning the same bleak lesson: “Nothing but rainy days ahead … You will be knocked down again … Never get back on the horse, because it’s going to throw you every damn chance it gets”.

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Though Dickens was a chronicler of the social ills of his time, his books were best loved as entertainment. Likewise, though Kingsolver takes aim at numerous social issues — institutional impoverishment, hillbilly prejudice, underfunding in school and social care systems, the modern opioid crisis — readers are more likely to warm to the story than any message it imparts. Indeed, the message implicit in the trajectory of many a Dickens hero is that individual superiority will save you from systemic adversity.

Where Copperfield has preternatural talents as a writer, Copperhead has preternatural talents as a comic strip artist. And he’s endowed with the “promise from God” that he’ll “never drown”. Only the anointed are saved. It’s not the most pleasing message, but enchanted as we are by our hero, and the expert way his story is told, it’s hard to wish for anything else for dear Demon.

Niamh Donnelly

Niamh Donnelly, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a writer and critic

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Demon Copperhead: A Pulitzer Prize Winner Hardcover – October 18, 2022

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WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

A New York Times "Ten Best Books of the Year" • An Oprah’s Book Club Selection • An Instant  New York Times  Bestseller • An Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller • A #1  Washington Post  Bestseller 

"Demon is a voice for the ages—akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield—only even more resilient.” —Beth Macy, author of  Dopesick

"May be the best novel of [the year]. . . . Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love.” (Ron Charles,  Washington Post )

From the acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees,  a brilliant novel that enthralls, compels, and captures the heart as it evokes a young hero’s unforgettable journey to maturity

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote  David Copperfield  from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story.  Demon Copperhead  speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

• Print length 560 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date October 18, 2022
• Dimensions 6 x 1.48 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0063251922
• ISBN-13 978-0063251922
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review.

"Demon is a voice for the ages—akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield—only even more resilient. I’m crazy about this book, which parses the epidemic in a beautiful and intimate new way. I think it’s her best.” — Beth Macy, author of Dopesick

“Brilliant. . . . A page turner and Kingsolver’s best novel by far. . . . Kingsolver has some of Mark Twain in her, along with 21st-century gifts of her own. More than ever, she is our literary mirror and window. May this novel be widely read and championed.” — Minneapolis Star-Tribune

" May be the best novel of 2022... Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love….You may be reminded of another orphaned boy slipping through the country’s underbrush, just trying to stay out of trouble: Huck Finn. With Demon, Kingsolver has created an outcast equally reminiscent of Twain’s masterpiece, speaking in the natural poetry of the American vernacular….Kingsolver's best demonstration yet of a novel’s ability to simultaneously entertain and move and plead for reform." — Ron Charles, Washington Post

“If you’re familiar with the Charles Dickens classic, you’ll follow the story’s beats and chuckle….What keeps you turning the pages is the knowledge that Demon has a future. The novel ends on a note of hope...not every fate is decided by the circumstances of one’s birth.”   — Associated Press

" There’s really nothing like being immersed in a Kingsolver novel. . . . Damon [is Kingsolver’s] bravest, most ambitious creation yet." — Los Angeles Times

“Kingsolver’s capacious, ingenious, wrenching, and funny survivor’s tale is a virtuoso present-day variation on Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. . . . Kingsolver’s tour de force is a serpentine, hard-striking tale of profound dimension and resonance.” — Booklist (Starred Review)

“An epic…brimming with vitality and outrage….the rare 560-page book you wish would never end.” — People "Book of the Week"

“With its bold reversals of fate and flamboyant cast, this is storytelling on a grand scale. . . . As Demon discovers, owning his story—every part of it—and finding a way to tell it is how he’ll wrest some control over his life. And what a story it is: acute, impassioned, heartbreakingly evocative, told by a narrator who’s a product of multiple failed systems, yes, but also of a deep rural landscape with its own sustaining traditions.”   — The Guardian

“Extraordinary. . . . Much like Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain or Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield , Kingsolver’s epic is narrated by a self-professed screwup with a heart of gold . . . chock-full of cinematic twists and turns. It’s a book that demands we start paying attention to—and embracing—a long-ignored community and its people." — San Francisco Chronicle

" Kingsolver's new novel is her best in years . . . . The character of Damon is right up there with the best classic orphans of literatre. Believe me: you will root for this lost boy." — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“In Demon Copperhead …Kingsolver channels the voice of a disenfranchised boy lost in the failures of our social system. It's a testament to her storytelling mastery that this novel also illustrates how deeply intertwined our attitudes about nature are with our collective destiny. As always, her purpose is to make us think about the ways we all must look out for each other.” — Arizona Republic

“Absorbing….Readers see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath Demon’s self-protective exterior…. Emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it…. An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.” — Kirkus Review (Starred Review)

“A deeply evocative story…Kingsolver’s account of the opioid epidemic and its impact on the social fabric of Appalachia is drawn to heartbreaking effect. This is a powerful story, both brilliant in its many social messages regarding foster care, child hunger, and rural struggles, and breathless in its delivery.” — Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

“Kingsolver brings a notably different energy from her previous work to  Demon Copperhead …through a tremendous narrative voice, one so sharp and fresh as to overwhelm the reader’s senses….Demon’s spirit comes through, and it is haunting. It’s the reason the pages keep turning….Kingsolver has made this story her own, and what a joy it is to slip into this world and inhabit it, even with all its challenges.” — BookPage

“ Demon Copperhead is a propulsive reading experience, energetic and funny while still conveying Kingsolver’s fury at the institutions that have let her community down.” — Slate

“You’ll be enthralled by [Demon’s] voice, simultaneously hilarious and wise, as he illuminates life in rural America…..this is the ideal late-fall read to sink your teeth into.” — Real Simple

“A dazzling novel….a lyrical re-dreaming of Dickens’s David Copperfield . The social injustices of Victorian England have been transplanted, with spellbinding success, to modern-day Appalachia…populated by America’s rural white underclass and now ravaged by the opioid crisis…Kingsolver maintains an astonishing level of energy and intensity…. This novel is surely a highpoint of Kingsolver’s long career and a strong early candidate for next year's Booker Prize. ” — Times Literary Supplement

“A riveting, epic tale…[Kingsolver’s] exquisite writing takes a wrenching story and makes it worthwhile… Kingsolver has given us a superb novel.” — Christian Science Monitor

"A heartrending, probing and ultimately hopeful tale about a young boy’s journey from devastation to survival…. It’s hard to ascertain which is more brilliant, Kingsolver’s skill in modernizing Dickens’ narrative or the voice she gives to the privations and adversities facing the land and people she so dearly loves.”   — Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"This is storytelling at its best. The voice rings true and so do the incidents." — Stephen King

About the Author

Barbara Kingsolver was born in 1955 and grew up in rural Kentucky. She earned degrees in biology from DePauw University and the University of Arizona, and has worked as a freelance writer and author since 1985. At various times she has lived in England, France, and the Canary Islands, and has worked in Europe, Africa, Asia, Mexico, and South America. She spent two decades in Tucson, Arizona, before moving to southwestern Virginia where she currently resides.

Her books, in order of publication, are:  The Bean Trees  (1988),  Homeland  (1989),  Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike  (1989),  Animal Dreams  (1990),  Another America  (1992),  Pigs in Heaven  (1993),  High Tide in Tucson  (1995),  The Poisonwood Bible  (1998),  Prodigal Summer  (2000),  Small Wonder  (2002),  Last Stand: America’s Virgin Lands,  with photographer Annie Griffiths (2002),  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life  (2007),  The Lacuna  (2009),  Flight Behavior  (2012),  Unsheltered  (2018),  How To Fly (In 10,000 Easy Lessons)  (2020),  Demon Copperhead  (2022), and coauthored with Lily Kingsolver,  Coyote's Wild Home  (2023). She served as editor for Best American Short Stories 2001. 

Kingsolver was named one the most important writers of the 20th Century by Writers Digest, and in 2023 won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel  Demon Copperhead . In 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal, our country’s highest honor for service through the arts. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have been adopted into the core curriculum in high schools and colleges throughout the nation. Critical acclaim for her work includes multiple awards from the American Booksellers Association and the American Library Association, a James Beard award, two-time Oprah Book Club selection, and the national book award of South Africa, among others. She was awarded Britain's prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) for both  Demon Copperhead  and  The Lacuna , making Kingsolver the first author in the history of the prize to win it twice. In 2011, Kingsolver was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She has two daughters, Camille (born in 1987) and Lily (1996). She and her husband, Steven Hopp, live on a farm in southern Appalachia where they raise an extensive vegetable garden and Icelandic sheep. 

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper; First Edition (October 18, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 560 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0063251922
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0063251922
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.91 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.48 x 9 inches
• #4 in Small Town & Rural Fiction (Books)
• #15 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
• #28 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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About the author

Barbara kingsolver.

Her books, in order of publication, are: The Bean Trees (1988), Homeland (1989), Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike (1989), Animal Dreams (1990), Another America (1992), Pigs in Heaven (1993), High Tide in Tucson (1995), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), Prodigal Summer (2000), Small Wonder (2002), Last Stand: America's Virgin Lands, with photographer Annie Griffiths (2002), Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007), The Lacuna (2009), Flight Behavior (2012), Unsheltered (2018), How To Fly (In 10,000 Easy Lessons) (2020), Demon Copperhead (2022), and coauthored with Lily Kingsolver, Coyote's Wild Home (2023). She served as editor for Best American Short Stories 2001.

Kingsolver was named one the most important writers of the 20th Century by Writers Digest, and in 2023 won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Demon Copperhead. In 2000 she received the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages and have been adopted into the core curriculum in high schools and colleges throughout the nation. Critical acclaim for her work includes multiple awards from the American Booksellers Association and the American Library Association, a James Beard award, two-time Oprah Book Club selection, and the national book award of South Africa, among others. She was awarded Britain's prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) for both Demon Copperhead and The Lacuna, making Kingsolver the first author in the history of the prize to win it twice. In 2011, Kingsolver was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She has two daughters, Camille (born in 1987) and Lily (1996). She and her husband, Steven Hopp, live on a farm in southern Appalachia where they raise an extensive vegetable garden and Icelandic sheep.

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Erik Larson vividly captures the struggle for Fort Sumter

‘The Demon of Unrest’ zooms in on a place, time and small group of actors whose individual dramas encapsulate broader events in the run-up to the Civil War

So many books on the American Civil War have been published in the past 160 years that it’s been estimated they average out to at least one per day since the surrender at Appomattox. Still, they keep coming, rank upon rank, a relentless army of paper and ink.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Every generation revises its understanding of the conflict and its causes, heavily influenced by the context of the times. A century or so ago, in an era of racial denialism, historians groped for any explanation besides slavery to define the war’s origins. Half a century later, in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, White scholars began paying serious attention to the roles African Americans played in the conflict’s onset and outcome. (Black scholars had been doing so since the 19th century.) A decade ago, after the election of America’s first Black president, the war could be portrayed as an awakening of the national conscience that, despite its awful cost, would eventually bend history’s arc toward justice.

Now, the popular historian Erik Larson has written a Civil War story that — as he says in the book’s first paragraphs — was shaped by the events of Jan. 6, 2021 , when the U.S. Capitol was stormed by a mob of self-proclaimed American patriots (some of whom, with no apparent sense of irony, brandished Confederate flags while howling imprecations against “traitors”).

“As I watched the Capitol assault unfold on camera,” Larson writes in “ The Demon of Unrest ,” “I had the eerie feeling that present and past had merged. It is unsettling that in 1861 two of the greatest moments of national dread centered on the certification of the Electoral College vote and the presidential inauguration. … I realized that the anxiety, anger, and astonishment that I felt would certainly have been experienced in 1860-1861 by vast numbers of Americans.”

Although the book’s subtitle promises a Civil War “saga” — suggesting an epic sweep across years and battles — this isn’t quite right. Rather, as he has done artfully in his previous books (which have together sold some 10 million copies), Larson zooms in tightly on a specific place, time and small group of actors whose individual dramas are supposed to encapsulate broader historical events. His main narrative ends before the war’s first drop of blood has been shed.

The object of Larson’s concentrated focus is the five-month period between Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency, in November 1860, and the surrender of Fort Sumter by a small federal garrison, which had held on while surrounding Southern states proclaimed their secession from the Union. Meanwhile, leaders in Washington and the nascent Confederacy maneuvered to determine the fate of the South Carolina outpost, the last significant bastion of federal authority in the rebel South. The fort finally struck its colors on April 13, after two days of relentless artillery bombardment by Confederate forces encircling Charleston Harbor, a battle that nonetheless concluded with only a few minor injuries on each side.

Perhaps no other historian has ever rendered the struggle for Sumter in such authoritative detail as Larson does here. Having picked his way through a vast labyrinth of primary and secondary sources (some of them contradictory), he emerges with a narrative that strides confidently from one chapter to the next. Few historians, too, have done a better job of untangling the web of intrigues and counter-intrigues that helped provoke the eventual attack and surrender — how a few slightly different decisions by leaders on both sides could have led to dramatically different outcomes in the secession crisis, ones that might not have involved a war at all.

Larson begins each section of his book with an epigraph taken from a 19th-century manual on the intricate protocols of dueling. This points to a central theme: that the Sumter contest was a match of strength and wits by gentlemen on both sides whose behavior was governed not just by differing strategies and ideologies, but by a strict sense of honor.

Yet it also points to some of the book’s deficiencies. Larson’s Civil War is a “mano a mano” between a few elite White men in Washington and Charleston, while the other 30 million Americans remain a vague offstage presence. This is despite the fact that the rapidly shifting tides of public opinion in both North and South ultimately determined the course of the Sumter standoff — just as much as, or even more than, the political leaders’ thrusts and parries. It’s also an odd choice given Larson’s initial claim that his narrative was shaped by the storming of the Capitol — as if he had seen that recent moment as simply a test of wits between President Donald Trump on one side and President-elect Joe Biden on the other.

Black Americans are almost always treated as an unnamed, undifferentiated mass of passive victims: Although Larson unmasks the cruelty and hypocrisy of wealthy White enslavers, Frederick Douglass appears just once in the book’s 500 pages. Other Black activists, authors and strategists never do. Abolitionists (White as well as Black) are hardly mentioned, and then only as radical irritants to both sides whose inconvenient existence inflamed the tensions that led to disunion. In this sense, “The Demon of Unrest” sometimes reads more like a product of the 1920s than of the 2020s.

Even in his portrayals of the White elite, Larson makes puzzling choices. Very early in the book, he devotes more than 30 pages to the prewar life of a loathsome planter turned senator, James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, seeming to set him up as one of the narrative’s major characters. But then Hammond largely disappears, popping up just a few times in passing.

Overall, the Confederate figures in Larson’s book are more fully fleshed out than those above the Mason-Dixon Line, with the sole exception of Lincoln. It’s difficult to find new things to say about the 16th president, but Larson has an eye for the illuminating detail. For instance, he describes a “yard sale” of household goods (including six chairs, a mattress and some comforters) that the Lincolns held in early 1861 to help fund their train journey to the inauguration. It’s a sign of just how middle-class the family was, a stark contrast to nearly all who occupied the White House before or since.

The most fascinating character in “The Demon of Unrest” is Maj. Robert Anderson, the reserved, gray-haired U.S. Army officer who held Fort Sumter for half a year, despite the vast military superiority of his massing Confederate foes and the feeble, vacillating support of the Buchanan administration. A Kentuckian and former enslaver, Anderson nonetheless did his duty, knowing that — in the words of another officer at the fort, Abner Doubleday — “the first shot fired by us would light the flames of a civil war that would convulse the world.” A willing withdrawal from Sumter, meanwhile, would have signaled the federal government’s acquiescence to secession and possibly sealed the nation’s dissolution.

The portrait of Anderson is Larson at his best. It is also a reminder of the intricate contingencies of history, whose outcomes do sometimes depend — at least partly — on the decisions of a single person.

Adam Goodheart is a historian at Washington College and the author of “1861: The Civil War Awakening.”

The Demon of Unrest

A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

By Erik Larson

Crown. 592 pp. $35

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Maybe Erik Larson Should Have Left the Civil War Alone

In “The Demon of Unrest,” present-day political strife inspires a dramatic portrait of the run-up to the deadliest war on American soil.

Maj. Robert Anderson in 1860. Credit... George S. Cook, via Library of Congress

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By Alexis Coe

Alexis Coe is a fellow at New America and the author, most recently, of “You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington.”

• April 30, 2024
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THE DEMON OF UNREST: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War, by Erik Larson

The Civil War is one hell of a drug. It’s plentiful and Main Street-legal, but can induce hallucinatory visions when mixed with inflammatory substances. “I’m so attracted to seeing it,” former President Donald J. Trump confessed at a rally this past Jan. 6, three years after his “Big Lie” inspired followers to storm the Capitol — a feat the Southern Confederacy and its campaign to preserve slavery were unable to accomplish, even as the effort left more than 600,000 people dead in its wake.

In “The Demon of Unrest ,” Erik Larson recounts being “appalled” but also “riveted” by Jan. 6 and by “today’s political discord, which, incredibly, has led some benighted Americans to whisper of secession and civil war.”

When Larson, the reigning king of Dad History, drops a new book on the Civil War a month and a half before Father’s Day in a pivotal election year, he knows what he’s doing. Sort of. “The Demon of Unrest ” is Larson’s first book on the Civil War. And his green horns show.

Ostensibly, it mirrors his best-selling books — among them, “ The Splendid and the Vile ” and “ The Devil in the White City ” — with the same pulpy, black-and-white cover treatment and bulky page count, satisfying the collect-them-all, size-matters kind of reader.

The drama unfolds between Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 and the following April, when Confederate troops in Charleston, S.C., shelled Fort Sumter and started the Civil War. During those tense five months, Lincoln hoped, despite a pro-slavery mob’s attempt to stop Congress from tallying the vote and decades of physical violence within the Senate and House chambers , that the war might narrowly be avoided.

At the start the outgoing president, James Buchanan, is maddeningly passive in the face of cabinet resignations and seceding states, including South Carolina, where Confederates would see federal forces arriving at Fort Sumter as nothing short of a foreign incursion. “They ought to hang him,” an astonished Lincoln privately remarks, bewildered by Buchanan’s talk of surrendering federal forts.

Publicly, Lincoln maintains a determined yet conciliatory posture even as Larson’s other hero, Maj. Robert Anderson, a former enslaver and the fort’s commander, is under siege by thousands of better-armed Confederate soldiers and running out of supplies. Anderson and his 80 or so men pray for the best while cornered by the worst.

The stage is set. “I invite you now to step into the past,” Larson writes, and he means it. He wants you not just immersed, but engulfed. A Larson book is like the Dead Sea: The extraordinarily dense level of details — “On the stillest nights, at 9 o’clock, Major Anderson could hear the great bells in the distant witch-cap spire of St. Michael’s Church, bastion of Charleston society where planters displayed rank by purchasing pews” — usually allows readers to float on his narrative without much effort.

I tried my best not to swim, but on more than one occasion, I almost drowned from exertion, especially in the incredibly banal final stretch. And still there was something lacking in the book’s 565 pages: Nary a Black person, free or enslaved, is presented as more than a fleeting, one-dimensional figure. Frederick Douglass, a leading abolitionist and standard of histories of the era, warrants no more than a mention.

Black people are primarily nameless victims of an antagonistic labor system that’s causing a political crisis among white Americans. At one point, to differentiate this near monolith, Larson employs the term “escape-minded Blacks,” a curious turn of phrase that suggests there were “bondage-minded Blacks.”

The flattening is all the more noticeable because so many other characters are given shape. Larson offers a cradle-to-coffin biography of the South Carolina congressman-turned-Confederate James Hammond. Lengthy passages on Hammond’s “five-way affair” with (read: sexual abuse of) four teenage nieces are followed by a short, unnervingly euphemistic account of the enslaved women he (and his son) raped and impregnated: Hammond made Sally Johnson “his mistress,” and when her daughter Louisa turned 12, he “made her his mistress as well.”

Larson’s magnolias-under-the-moonlight word choice is inadequate. Sally and Louisa were damned to Hammond’s forced labor camps, along with more than 300 enslaved people who “had a penchant for dying.” But they got Christmas off, Larson notes; Hammond “held a barbecue” and, on one occasion, “gave a calico frock to every female who had given birth.”

“Cotton is king,” Hammond declared in 1858. The phrase would come to epitomize the newly minted Confederacy’s misguided confidence in both its economic domination and the war. The greatest echo of the present day in “The Demon of Unrest” may be Larson’s newcomer ego, a swaggering disregard for the difference between the shopworn and the truly complex that leads straight into the pitfalls of nostalgia and hubris.

At his Jan. 6 anniversary rally, a century and a half after the Civil War ended, Trump suggested that Lincoln could have negotiated his way out of the conflict and avoided the killing — but only at great personal cost. “If he negotiated it,” Trump observed, “you probably wouldn’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.” What better reason could there have been to fight?

THE DEMON OF UNREST : A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War | By Erik Larson | Crown | 565 pp. | $35

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