Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

4/5 rating. 546 pages.

Book #24 of 2023. Read July 8, 2023.

This novel is Damon (nickname “Demon”) telling the story of his childhood up until about age twenty-one.

This book was soooo good and really entertaining! Demon has quite a story to tell as a rural Virginian in Lee County living in poverty, dealing with foster care, drugs, abuse, and all of the hardships that come with all of this. I especially gained a lot from this book after the recent books I’ve read and looking into all about OxyContin and the opioid epidemic. Having first gotten an idea of how much this decimated places like Lee County, this book really drove home some of what it was like to be caught up as a kid during this time. It seems that nearly every family that Demon is associated with has lost at least one parent to dying through drugs, bad luck, or to prison, or some other way.

OxyContin weaves its way through this story as it did in most lives during the last twenty years in rural Appalachia, with a family friend who is a nurse practitioner even saying “I know what you’re thinking about…But there’s absolutely no chance of you getting dependent on this medication. The company did all kinds of studies. I can show you the package insert.”

The book also does a great job of showing the humanity in Appalachia. I’ve talked with a lot of people about part of the allure of Trump and this book hits it right on the head: “It’s everybody out there. Reading about us being shit-eater loser trash jerkoffs.” It’s only logical to go along with the first person to tell you you’re not worthless or deplorables. Too many of the Democrats are stuck-up and condescending (I say this as pretty far left and sick of that portion of it) and forget that the people like Demon in this book are just trying to make a living like everyone else.

This book was awesome! 

Quotes:

“The eye sees what it cares enough to see.”

“I told her nobody ever asked me that question before, about growing up and what I want to be, I didn’t know. Mainly still alive.”

“But time passed and eventually my mind had only one thought in it regardless of childhood. For any kids that gets that as an option: take that sweet thing and run with it. Hide. Love it so hard. Because it’s going to fucking leave you and not come back.”

“Their neighbors got interviewed and said what neighbors always say on TV after a shocking crime, about the victim or murderer either one: totally unexpected, you never saw a nicer person. In other words, they’re paying zero attention to their neighbors.”

“We both lay back down, and she looked at me in the eyes, and we were sad together for a while. I’ll never forget how that felt. Like not being hungry.”

“I remember which one of them said that, and the day. Due to that being the one nice thing anybody said to me that year.”

“The moral of his story was how you never know the size of hurt that’s in people’s hearts, or what they’re liable to do about it, given the chance.”

“I’d laid out of school plenty, mostly due to grown-ups wanting to get some better use out of me.”

“I wanted to go home. Which was nowhere, but it’s a feeling you keep having, even after that’s no place anymore.”

“As far as I’d seen, the basis of friendship for guys past the age of bedwetting is trash talk. Throw ‘fuck’ into any sentence and you’re dead hilarious.”

“If I stayed here, would I turn into one of these Jonesville Middle School babies? Not something to worry about, I knew. Nobody ever kept me that long.”

“These people and vegetarians and so forth that are all about being fair to the races and the gays, I am down for that. I agree. But would it cross any mind to be fair to us? No, it would not. How do I know? TV. The comedy channel is so funny it can make you want to go unlock the gun cabinet and kill yourself. Do they really think that along with being brainless and having sex with animals, we don’t even have cable?”

“I didn’t spell out to Angus what she couldn’t understand: that without football I’d be nobody again. That the loser Demon was still right there under the surface, and if I lost the shine, I was nothing.”

“Kent Holt is a fucking hired killer for his company.” – talking about the OxyContin sales rep

“I wasn’t some child, having my little pharm party. I was going by the book, doctor’s orders.”

“I’ve been waiting to have one of those nice days for, what. Eight or nine years?”

“I thought I knew it all in those days. I’d seen people at school, in the locker room, even at Mr. Peg’s funeral, with stains on their shirttails. Greenish grass stains, or pinkish brown like dirt. How could those people be so prideless, I thought, showing up in dirty shirts. I didn’t know that was the coating of a pill that keeps this safer-than-safe drug from dissolving in your stomach all at one time. Coppery pink on the 80 milligrams, green on the 40’s. Melts in your mouth like an M&M. Hold it there a minute, then take it out and rub it on your shirttail, and you’re looking at a shiny white pearl of pure oxy. More opioid than any pill ever before invented. One buck gets you a whole bottle of these on Medicaid, to be crushed and snorted one by one, or dissolved and injected with sheep-vax syringes from Farm Supply, in the crook of an arm or the webbing of your toes. People find more ways to shut up their monsters than a Bible has verses.“

“Mom says half these people don’t know they’re addicted. They took what some doctor told them to, and now they’re fiending and don’t really know what it is. All they know is, Mom cut off their drugs and now they feel like they’re dying.”

“Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn’t been totaled or repossessed.”

“Age-old story, who gets to look down on who, for what reason.”

“I asked Mr. Armstrong how things were going over at Jonesville Middle, and he said same as usual, pissing onto the burning wreck.”

“You can’t choose your family, but a partner is your shot at a decent do-over.”

“You have to get up every morning and decide again, in the cold lonely light of day, am I brave enough to stick this out?”

#demoncopperhead #bookrecommendations @barbara.kingsolver #opioids #ruralvirginia #readthisbook #books

IG Link.