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Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Demon Copperhead’ may be the best novel of 2022

It’s barely Halloween. The ball won’t drop in Times Square for another two full months, and more good books will surely appear before the year ends. But I already know: My favorite novel of 2022 is Barbara Kingsolver’s “ Demon Copperhead .”

Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love. Damon is the only child of a teenage alcoholic — “an expert at rehab” — in southwest Virginia. He becomes aware of his status early, around the same time he gets the nickname Demon. “I was a lowlife,” he says, “born in the mobile home, so that’s like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash.” The more he grasps the connotations of words like “hick” and “redneck,” the more discouraged he becomes. “This is what I would say if I could, to all the smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes. … We can actually hear you.”

Now, we can hear him.

“You get to a point of not giving a damn over people thinking you’re worthless,” he says. “Mainly by getting there first yourself.”

Demon is right about America’s condescending derision, but he’s wrong about his own worth. In a feat of literary alchemy, Kingsolver uses the fire of that boy’s spirit to illuminate — and singe — the darkest recesses of our country.

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The essential Americanness of “Demon Copperhead” feels particularly ironic given that Kingsolver has drawn her inspiration directly from one of England’s most celebrated classics: “ David Copperfield ,” by Charles Dickens. In a brief afterword, Kingsolver expresses her gratitude to Dickens and acknowledges living for years “with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy.”

Indeed, anyone familiar with Dickens’s most autobiographical novel will hear its characters and incidents echoing through these chapters. And in one particularly meta-moment, Kingsolver winks at her readers when Demon praises an author he discovered in school. Charles Dickens, he says, is “one seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but 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.”

There’s no denying the pleasure of seeing Dickens’s Peggottys transformed into the kindly Peggots, or his oily villain Uriah Heep recast as a sniveling assistant football coach named U-Haul Pyles. But too much can be made of these echoes. Kingsolver hasn’t merely reclothed Dickens’s characters in modern dress and resettled them in southern Appalachia, the way some desperate Shakespeare director might reimagine “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” taking place in an Ikea. No, Kingsolver has reconceived the story in the fabric of contemporary life. “Demon Copperhead” is entirely her own thrilling story, a fierce examination of contemporary poverty and drug addiction tucked away in the richest country on Earth.

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From the moment Demon starts talking to us, his story is already a boulder rolling down the Appalachian Mountains, faster and faster, stopping for nothing. “We’re one damn thing after another,” he says. “Sometimes a good day lasts all of about ten seconds.” Even before he’s born, his father, a man named Copperhead, has died under mysterious circumstances. Demon knows that his mother, bubbling with optimism and other spirits, is not to be counted on, but it’s still a shock when he loses her, too, and gets dropped into the gears of the foster-care system.

“I thought my life couldn’t get any worse,” he says. “Here’s some advice: Don’t ever think that.” He’s 10 years old.

Kingsolver has effectively reignited the moral indignation of the great Victorian novelist to dramatize the horrors of child poverty in the late 20th century. Demon’s descriptions of his life under the neglectful eye of Child Protective Services reveal one ordeal after another. Woefully overwhelmed, the state relies on placement companies, “rotating and merchandising foster boys at more than fifty customer accounts.” It’s a ghastly racket, akin to modern-day slavery, with shady foster parents signing on for the free labor and the state’s monthly checks. “Being big for your age is a trap,” Demon notes. “They send you to wherever they need a grown-up body that can’t fight back.” At its best, foster care is “like a cross between prison and dodgeball.”

And there’s the saving grace. This would be a grim melodrama if it weren’t for Demon’s endearing humor, an alloy formed by his unaffected innocence and weary cynicism. Assigned to a tobacco farm, for instance, Demon meets his new foster “dad,” Crickson, “a big, meaty guy with a red face and a greasy comb-over like fingers palming a basketball.” The derelict kitchen is covered with scum. “This man’s wife had passed away,” Demon says. “I wondered if her body was still lying somewhere back in that house, because I’d say there’d been zero tidying up around here since she kicked off.”

In such moments — and they’re everywhere in this novel — 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 attraction to the great 19th-century novels is not surprising. Since publishing her first novel, “ The Bean Trees ,” in 1988, she’s grown increasingly interested in stories that explore exigent social themes. In 2000, she established the Bellwether Prize, a $25,000 award designed to celebrate “socially engaged fiction” that addresses “issues of social justice and the impact of culture and politics on human relationships.”

That’s a tall order, fraught with the deadening risks of polemical art, and none of the prize winners I’ve read has reached anything close to Kingsolver’s combination of subtlety and power. Now, with “Demon Copperhead,” she’s raised the bar even higher, providing her best demonstration yet of a novel’s ability to simultaneously entertain and move and plead for reform.

Much of that success stems from how cleverly Demon’s experience is woven through the tragedy of opioid addiction in the United States. This boy grows up in the early days of that miracle pill, OxyContin, and Kingsolver illustrates how a conspiracy of capitalism and criminality preyed on the pain of poor Americans to create a shockingly profitable and deadly industry.

“I don’t know a single person my age that’s not taking pills,” Demon says at one point. “If you’ve not known the dragon we were chasing, words may not help.” But these words, laid out in the achingly candid voice of a young man who barely survives, create a visceral picture of that dragon.

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“Where does the road to ruin start?” Demon asks. “That’s the point of getting all this down, I’m told. To get the handle on some choice you made.” But part of his struggle involves realizing how much of this road has been laid by forces entirely outside his control. At one point, a kind woman tells Demon that he mustn’t think he has to be responsible for everything. His job, she insists, is “just to be a little boy.”

“Weird,” Demon thinks. “I’d not had that job before.”

In such tender moments, this story feels almost too much to bear.

Demon survives. On some level, we always know that; he’s the narrator, after all. But the harrowing story Kingsolver tells — including a particularly frightening climax — makes his life seem continually in peril. His resilience, in the face of so many personal tragedies and governmental failures, makes him a name to remember.

“I was starting to get known as Demon Copperhead,” he says in a rare moment of pride. “You can’t deny, it’s got a power to it.”

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.

Demon Copperhead

By Barbara Kingsolver

Harper. 548 pp. $32.50

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2022

New York Times Bestseller

Pulitzer Prize Winner

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

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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

by Percival Everett ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2024

One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.

This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.

Pub Date: March 19, 2024

ISBN: 9780385550369

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

More by Percival Everett

by Percival Everett

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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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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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Book Review: Demon Copperhead

Circulation manager pamela parker recommends demon copperhead: a tale retold by barbara kingsolver .

Best known for the parallels to Charles Dicken’s 1850 semi-autobiographic novel,  David Copperfield (1850), Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Demon Copperhead (2022), recounts a boy’s coming-of-age in Appalachia during the height of the opioid epidemic, which ran at its worst from 2007-2016. 

Kingsolver’s work takes us to Lee County, Virginia, where Demon “got himself born” on the bathroom floor of a backwoods trailer. His mother is an opiate addict who soon overdoses, leaving Demon stranded between a dumb, abusive stepfather and a highly dysfunctional foster-care system. Demon’s first-person narrative follows his life experiences during a time when his rural community faces the brutal fallout of widespread drug use as he’s approaching adulthood. 

He’s first placed with the McCombs family who run a foster home where boys are put to work to bring in extra cash. From trash sorting to tobacco picking, Demon describes in vivid detail the realities of his childhood labor. He eventually finds his way into the sprawling Winfield family, who like the Peggotty family in Dicken’s life, become a much-needed refuge. He starts attending school regularly, and Coach Winfield introduces him to football. The strong, red-headed Demon becomes a star running back for his high school. But soon enough his strength is tested beyond the physical. He meets Dori, whose bedridden father gets easy access to prescription opioids, and this leads them toward the inevitable. 

I read this 2023 Pulitzer Prize winning novel in one stretch and found it totally engaging. Demon’s humor and point-blank storytelling are hard to put down.

I got to wondering what it is about someone else’s misery that can captivate a reader. The short answer is Demon himself—his indomitable spirit and keen storytelling carry us through a vivid landscape of life in a hard-knocks corner of rural America.  

His brutal honesty as he ‘tells all’ about the goings on makes one grateful for being from elsewhere but also able to connect with the challenges they face. I also began to care about this place I’ve never been, and the unique individuals that make up his world. His creative use of nicknames, like Stoner for his hapless stepfather, Fast Forward , his unscrupulous dealer friend, and Creaky , the old man who runs a farm where foster boys pick tobacco is priceless. 

A thin line between those that aim to help and those that serve their own interests emerges. 

As we cringe for him and this band of misfits and has-beens, we really want to know if the human spirit can endure such hard odds – and the answer is apparently ‘yes’ if we are to believe Kingsolver. I do suggest that you buckle up for a fast ride through some dangerous curves of Virginia’s poorest rural counties. It’s an exceptional work of contemporary fiction by one of the nation’s most gifted writers but the grittiest aspects of the story aren’t always easy going. 

Barbara Kingsolver grew up in Kentucky and now makes her home in Appalachia. Known for themes of environmentalism and social justice, she has found a second wind with Demon Copperhead (2022). Her other works include The Bean Trees ( 1988), Poisonwood Bible (1998) and a nonfiction account of her family’s effort to return to locally sourced eating, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle ( 2007). She has been awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for this most recent novel among other accolades.  

On Wednesday, October 4, at 5:30 pm , The Community Library Book Club will host a discussion of Demon Copperhead , and all are invited to join in. Sign up here!  

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StarTribune

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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A review of Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver HarperCollins October 2022, Hardcover, 560 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0063251922

Barbara Kingsolver, the prize-winning author of many outstanding novels, including The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna , and Flight Behaviour, sets her new novel, Demon Copperhead , in 1990s Appalachia. The central and southern portions of the Appalachian mountain range include the Catskill Mountains of New York, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina.  There, the American dream has gone “rotten,” says  Kingsolver’s central character, Damon Field, a.k.a. Demon Copperhead.

Demon Copperhead is a remarkable retelling of Charles Dickens’s classic Victorian novel, David Copperfield . In her acknowledgements, Kingsolver expresses her gratitude to Dickens for writing this “impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society…[I]n adapting his novel to my own place and time…I’ve come to think of him as my genius friend.”

Many novelists have retold classics from bygone eras. One thinks of Jane Smiley’s retelling of King Lear  in A Thousand Acres and Curtis Sittenfeld transforming Pride and Prejudice into Eligible . The fun in reading adaptations lies in seeing how the characters turn out in a new setting, and whether or not the author retains the theme of the original classic.

Readers familiar with Dickens’ David Copperfield  recall that David was the posthumous son of a well-to-do father who died in middle age, leaving David and his vulnerable mother behind. Suffering in several unsatisfactory living arrangements, David’s goals are not only to survive, but also to return to the middle class world. His tone is earnest and serious-minded, not cynical.

In contrast, Demon Copperhead was born to a single eighteen year old drug addict living in a rented house trailer on a neighbour’s property. In Demon’s words, his mother had already been in Alcoholics Anonymous for three years before she reached legal drinking age.

“The day I was born,” he writes, “her baby daddy’s mother turned up out of the blue,”  to take custody of him.  Demon’s mom orders her out, but dreads loss of custody so much that she “gives her all in rehab” in order to keep Demon.  Damon was nicknamed “Demon” as a baby, and later on, in school, was called “Copperhead” because of his red hair.  “Copperheads” are also venomous pit-vipers native to Appalachia. These nicknames suit a narrator/protagonist with a colloquial, frank, irreverent voice, who is more Huck Finn than David Copperfield.

Kingsolver takes her engaging young narrator through Dickens’s major plot points. In Dickens’s novel, David’s troubles begin when his mother marries Mr. Murdstone; similarly, Demon’s life takes a downturn after his mom meets Murrell Stone in Walmart. Stone, nicknamed “Stoner,” seems to be a catch (his job as truck-driver for a brewing company includes medical and dental coverage for Demon and his mother), but he turns out to be an abusive bully toward the young boy and his mom. He forbids Demon to contact his playmate, Matt,  claiming that Matt is a bad influence because he’s a “little faggot” with a jailbird mother. Stoner’s cruelty drives Demon’s mother back to drugs and ultimately to an overdose.

Matt’s grandmother, Mrs. Peggott, is an update of  “Peggotty,” the kindly household helper of Dickens’s novel. She takes Demon under her wing, treating him like another grandson.  She and her husband, “Peg,” have grown-up children and a large extended family. With Matt, nicknamed “Maggot,” Demon enjoys an active outdoor life on the Peggotts’s land, and learns from Mr. Peggott how to hunt. Demon thinks Mrs. Peggott is his grandmother:

“I thought all kids got a mammaw, along with a caseworker and free school lunch and the canned beanie-weenies they gave you in a bag to take home for weekends. Like ‘assigned.’” As a child, he doesn’t realize he and his mother are poor.Eventually Demon meets the Peggotts’s  adult daughter, June, one of several strong women characters in Kingsolver’s novel, and a wise presence who helps Demon when he is at a low ebb. June is raising her late brother’s child, a girl named “Emmy”  while working full time as an ER nurse in Knoxville, Tennessee, and studying to be a nurse practitioner. She then returns to Lee County to heal the people she grew up with.  In Dickens’s novel, seaman Daniel Peggotty persists in his effort to rescue his adopted daughter, Little Em’ly, and in Kingsolver’s novel, June plays this role with Emmy.

After his mother’s death, Demon becomes a client of  the Department of Social Services (DSS).  One of his case workers, a young woman named “Miss Bark,” genuinely cares about children, like “Barkis” in David Copperfield. She does her best for Demon, but has too many clients  for too few foster homes.

Demon’s first placement is on a subsistence farm, where, at age ten, he is expected to tend livestock and help with the tobacco harvest. Though Mr. Crickson, the elderly widower farmer, exploits and neglects him, Demon learns a useful life lesson from  him. When Demon asks why the farmer has ‘Hillbilly Cadillac’ painted on his truck, the old man tells him that “hillbilly” is like the “N-word”, a pejorative, negative label.

“Other people made up ‘hillbilly’ to use on us…but they gave us a superpower by accident,” says Crickson. “Saying that word back to people proves they can’t ever be us, and we are untouchable by their shit.”  Wearing a negative label proudly is one way of fighting back in an unjust world.

At the farm, Demon meets an older foster child,  Sterling Ford, a.k.a. “Fast Forward”. Sixteen years of age when Demon first meets him, Fast Forward is handsome, athletic and charming, using his compelling (perhaps sociopathic) personality to extort money and candy from the younger children. He hosts a “farm” party for them, which is actually a “pharm” party, at which they take pills.  Fast Forward’s original character, “Steerforth” in  Dickens’s novel, is the pampered son of a middle class widowed mother, but in Kingsolver’s story, he is just another orphan trying to survive by using the talents he has.   Both Fast Forward and Steerforth cause a lot of misery before they meet similarly dramatic ends.

Demon’s next foster parents, Mr. and Mrs. McCobb  are not the impecunious but good-hearted, loveable Micawbers of Dickens’s novel. Mr. McCobb keeps trying and failing at get-rich-quick small business ventures, and although he and his wife profess to care about Demon, they pocket the stipend the state pays them for his keep and fail to provide him with the necessities of life. After Demon steals from their junk-food stash, they get him a part-time job (he’s eleven) at a mini-market/ garbage dump/ secret meth lab run by a newcomer to the U.S., Mr. Golly.  A “dalet” in India, (member of the untouchable caste) Mr. Golly is kind to Demon and feels fortunate to be in the U.S.A. Demon begins to think that his fellow “hillbillies” of Appalachia are the “dalet” class in America.

“It is vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present,” wrote Dickens in David Copperfield . The British 19th century poor he depicts in his novel were casualties of the transition from a land-based economy to industrial capitalism.  In Kingsolver’s novel, the reader becomes aware of the  waves of exploitation that have taken place in Appalachia.  Originally a region of small farmers, this part of the U.S. first encountered capitalism in the form of big coal companies buying up land, paying low wages for dangerous work, and  keeping out other industries so as to have a monopoly on cheap labour.  The miners went on strike for decent pay and conditions; the  unions secured them some gains, but, by the 1990s, coal mining is in decline and the new businesses that have started up, like Walmart, are not unionized.

Tobacco farming was once subsidized by the U.S. government, but when smoking was found to be carcinogenic, the assistance was removed, leaving farmers facing bankruptcy and foreclosure. Because of high unemployment, military recruiters have found in Appalachia a plentiful source of soldiers to fight in Vietnam and subsequent wars.  In the 1990s, big pharmaceutical companies profited from the health issues of people in the region by encouraging the use of addictive painkillers such as oxycontin. We see a youth with a football injury, who has to travel to another state to get an MRI, killing his pain with prescription medication while continuing to play the game. School boards spend a large proportion of their budgets on football and starve academics and the creative arts.

Though Demon hits bottom, he rises again and, by the novel’s end, is pursuing an artistic activity that subverts the status quo and earns him some money. The open ending  shows Demon fulfilling a long-term aspiration, accompanied by a friend with great strength of character.

Demon hopes to live his life in Lee County, VA, where he can enjoy nature, where he has some friends, and where some community solidarity, though weakened, still exists.  This community spirit is shown by Peg Peggotty’s funeral, a warm affair with  friends and neighbours sharing stories and memories of the deceased. While churches don’t feature prominently in the novel, readers may notice that they do some charitable work on behalf of children.

Dickens’ novel suggests that the answers to the huge social problems of Victorian England lay in personal endurance, generosity, goodwill and domestic happiness. In Kingsolver’s novel we see these virtues alive in Appalachia, along with the attitude that it is better to be self-sufficient than to impose on neighbours or “be beholden” to them.   While R.D Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy , blames poverty and degradation on people’s lack of moral fibre, Kingsolver’s novel implies that the culprit is the negative effects of large-scale private enterprise imposed from outside the region.

Her novel hints at government programs that could help the economy of the region and the well-being of the people in it.  For instance, readers can see from the story that recovering addicts need long-term rehabilitation programs, not those that last only a couple of weeks.  And if  small freeholder agriculture was sustainable when the government subsidized tobacco-growing, the family farm and its way of life close to nature could be revitalized by subsidization of other less dangerous farm endeavours.

Through a radical teacher depicted in her novel, Kingsolver shows that if people are to awaken and act to make their lives better, they must first know their history. Although her story has a specific regional setting, all readers who have experienced life in a depressed area (Northeastern Ontario, Canada, being one example) will see a similarity between their communities and Demon Copperhead’s environment. He is the kind of central character that readers want to cheer for.

About the reviewer: Ruth Latta grew up in Northeastern Ontario, Canada.  Her new novel, A Striking Woman,  (Ottawa, Baico, 2023, [email protected] ) was inspired by the life of a Canadian woman trade unionist.

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, demon copperhead.

“First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they’ve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being let’s just say out of it.”

And so begins Barbara Kingsolver’s DEMON COPPERHEAD, a modern-day Appalachian David Copperfield story. A boy cannot escape the horrors of the opioid epidemic in one of the most beautiful yet poor parts of the American expanse. With the social concern of Dickens and the need to share how this happens to people who don’t plan it, Kingsolver brings passion and pathos to one young man’s account.

"The reader will connect to Demon in countless ways, but especially in his lack of agency. The book starts from the moment of his birth, and he offers his account without influencer-type victimization..."

Damon was called “Demon” by kids in the schoolyard. This turns out to be an apt nickname as it refers to the angriest of the many snakes that populate the wilderness around his home, the Copperhead. Demon bites to protect himself; he is born with a sense of love for the world and open mind that is consistently seen as worthy of chopping down like a beautiful young sapling in a dangerous territory. His gay best friend, his evil stepfather, his drugged-out mom, the Uriah Heep types who run the foster homes where he is sent --- they are all Dickensian personalities writ large in this low point of American history.

Demon tells his story like Huck Finn. The rhythm of his thoughts and the playful but lower-class syntax of his speech put him in his place. There are, however, so many opportunities for Demon to not have to bend to the expected in his world. But with a dead dad, well-meaning but powerless friends and family trying to help him, and a broken foster care system, he ends up exactly where we don’t want to see him go --- which is the point. Still, there is a whole journey here and one well worth traveling.

Kingsolver is a serious studier of American trauma and, as a novelist, tends to set her stories in a real place in a real time with a real problem that seems unsolvable. She manages to give these people more compassion than the real world gives them, and she offers a way out --- not in terms of process, but of how society as a whole can see this issue and shift it into a more positive gear. It will be her legacy as a novelist. As with many great authors like Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain or Toni Morrison, there is the sense that fiction can often get at a societal problem with so much heart and conviction that one can finally start to understand how deep a hole it has created in so many real people’s lives.

The reader will connect to Demon in countless ways, but especially in his lack of agency. The book starts from the moment of his birth, and he offers his account without influencer-type victimization --- he just is, and this is his story. It is that truthful, matter-of-fact tone that reaches into the reader’s heart and mind and pulls out even more compassion than any Appalachian drug documentary could.

Reviewed by Jana Siciliano on October 28, 2022

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

• Publication Date: October 18, 2022
• Genres: Fiction
• Hardcover: 560 pages
• Publisher: Harper
• ISBN-10: 0063251922
• ISBN-13: 9780063251922

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