In regard to Knockemstiff, he explained that “with a book that dark, I had to have some funny stuff in there or the reader might end up wanting to commit suicide by the time they got done reading it.” Devil is even darker and the humor is more deadly. Knockemstiff was dark and violent and filled with horror. That project became Pollock’s debut novel, The Devil All the Time. I asked him if he was working on another project? He said he was trying to write a novel about a serial killer. I interviewed him in 2008 when that book came out. He found his voice and wrote the stories that comprise Knockemstiff. Pollock spent years in his attic hunkered down over his typewriter. That was pretty much my attitude, that I at least had to try.” If at the end of that five years nothing’s happened I’ll give myself permission to quit and I can go on to my grave or to the rest home or whatever knowing that I at least gave it a shot. I said look I’m 45 and I’m going to give it five years. He said, “Well, that was the thing that I told my wife when I first decided I was going to try this thing. I called him the other day and asked him how he had come to the point where he decided to become an author. Pollock spent 32 years laboring in the Mead paper mill at Chillicothe, Ohio.
Knockemstiff lives on in his memories and upon the pages of his two books. It was one of those tightly knit Appalachian communities where half the residents were related to Pollock by blood or by marriage. Knockemstiff is the name of the now vanished hamlet in southern Ohio where Pollock grew up. Donald Ray Pollock describes his first novel, The Devil All the Time, as “gothic hillbilly noir.” Pollock’s other book, the short story collection Knockemstiff (Doubleday), represents another example of this particular genre.
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