Everybody’s Got One: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

It’s not fair, but it is what it is — not everyone gets the happy ending. And unfairer still, some people have to claw their way to just getting by.

Such are the lives of Demon, Dori, Emmy, Maggot, June, Tommy and the rest of the denizens of Lee County, Virginia in Barbara Kingsolver’s “Demon Copperhead.”

Kingsolver’s deep dive into the Appalachian opioid epidemic is not a happy one but certainly a hopeful one (and a Pulitzer-winning one, so yay I can check that off the list for the year!) if you can hang in there until the end. And that’s OK — just because this is indeed a sad tale, it’s exquisitely told. (I’m not gonna lie — the storytelling is crazy good but it IS long. I’m a sucker for doorstop books this year.)

Told through Demon’s voice, readers are invited into the life of a pre-teen boy born to a widowed mother in a trailer — a boy that is nothing if not resilient in the face of disappointment after disappointment from one day to the next. Tragic events unfold as they often do, funneling Demon in the foster system and horrible circumstance after horrible circumstance, until he takes a chance to find the grandmother he knows but has never met.

But while familial ties can sometimes be a promise of something better, it doesn’t guarantee a person will take advantage of them. And Demon’s inability to believe he is worthy of love means he goes looking for it in all the wrong places.

Demon’s … well … demons are made worse when the love of his young life takes advantage of his physical and emotional pain and introduces him to harder opioids. Once hooked on them and her, it’s impossible for Demon to see the point to anything. His resilience streak is probably the only thing keeping him tethered to the coherence. Just knowing if he lets go, he’ll never make it back.

It’s wild — and wildly upsetting — to consider that for so many people that have been destroyed by Oxy and its harder cousins, it all started with a single innocent mistake. A wrong turn. A dare. An injury. A promise from a “doctor” that the meds will make it all right. “Demon Copperhead” may be fiction, but the premise isn’t — all those people, chewed up by the Pharma machine disguised as pain clinics. There were plenty of voices of reason along the way for Demon, from Mrs. Peggot to Miss Annie to June to Angus, the women that love Demon tried to intervene. But that’s addiction for you. A squatter that sets up shop in your brain and flat out refuses to leave, no matter how hard you try to kick it out.

There’s plenty of grief and grace in these pages, and one of what feels like the most accurate depictions of the opioid epidemic this side of Stephen Markley’s “Ohio.” Somewhere in another universe, Demon is still out there making his way, and I am rooting for him until the bitter end. This is a great selection for book club, but as I already mentioned, it’s thick. If quick reads are your thing, this’ll have to be a two-parter. Don’t miss it.