Barbara Kingssolver - Demon Copperhead (2023)

I loved this book, it is one that I definitely might reread it in the future.

Already the first sentence is great: “First, I got myself born”. Demon Copperhead tells the story of Demon Copperhead, well, actually it’s Barbara Kingsolver telling the story of Appalachia, where the author is a native local. It is very easy to read, very flowy, despite its emotionally hard to digest content.

Demon grows up in Lee county, West Virginia, part of the Appalachian mountains region on the east side of the US, closer to Tennessee and Kentucky, than to the coast.

with dense wood and dirt roads.

There are a lot of prejudices, about the people there, it is said they are hillbillies, know nothing of city life, life like on TV, they are dead poor, use drugs, and never go anywhere.

Demon knows the people there at least are self sufficient, know how to garden and hunt and listen to the birds, and are resilient. Demon’s story is told from his perspective, as a first person narrator. It is kind of, as well, a retelling of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (which I have not yet read), a modern equivalent set in another continent and century, whereby the structure is similar, chapter by chapter, but especially the female characters differ.

Demon was born as Damon, but everyone in this place has a Nickname of sorts, so it was clear that no one would call him Damon. In Lee country is seems there are more trailers than real houses, I believe trailers is what we call mobile-homes in Europe, cheap movable houses, made for holidays or seasonal workers. Damon lives in a trailer, owned by the neighbors to whom they pay a little rent and who look after them.

It’s the 90’s. Damon’s mother, a single mom after the dead of her partner, was into drugs and alcohol, she was found passed out with the baby coming out but still in his sack, a miracle he survived. In Damon’s perspective it was him who had to do it all by himself from the start, get himself born.

He is called Copperhead because he is a redhead, and because this place is full of snakes that are called Copperhead and are venomous.

He has a great childhood running through the woods, playing in the creeks with his best friend and neighbor, Matthew Peggot. alias Maggot, while his mother off-and-on gets sober and works at the supermarket and then get drunk again.

He is that kind of child who draws a lot and knows how to draw very well, mostly comics and superheroes.

The Peggots who are Maggots grandparents because his mother is in jail, sometimes take him on trips to the city when they visit aunt June and their adopted daughter Emmy. June and Emmy widen Demons horizon and light up his world.

Demon’s father died before he was born, he drowned at a place called the Devil’s bathtub, but Damon doesn’t really know much about the circumstances and doesn’t ask, he only knows that bathtubs scare him. He has never seen the ocean and dreams of going there one day, for of the way he was born he is convinced he cannot drown, his only but strong superpower.

He grows up very close to his neighbors family, a boy his age named Maggot, Matthew Peggot, grows up to be queer and of quite a passive character, living with the grand parents, mother in prison.

Then his mother brings home this new boyfriend, his new "step Dad", called Stoner. Stoner, a stereotype of toxic masculinity abuses Damon with mostly psychological but also physical violence, and prohibits him to see his “queer” friend Maggot. His mother cares but doesn’t really know what to do.

- Maybe stop reading here if you don’t want to read spoilers. Read on if you don’t mind, I think the book is enjoyable even knowing the rough plot outline. If you have read the novel I would love to hear your opinion on it.

...

Okay, so from here poor Demons’ life kind of unravels.

His mother gets pregnant, they talk about marriage, then gets hospitalized with an overdose and then to rehab, and later dies from abuse of drugs and medication. For the time his mom is in the hospital and rehab Damon gets pulled into the Social Childcare Services featuring social workers who don’t care because they have a lot of cases all as severe and sad and don’t earn enough money to really have the time to dedicate themselves to their protected ones. He gets to foster care. First on a farm with other fostered kids, one impressive teenager called Fast Forward, and the fragile Tommy who draws skeletons. They have to do heavy farm chores all day for the old man who takes in fosters to pay his bills. He still hopes he can get back home eventually and live with the Peggots and be out of reach of Stoner, he is not an orphan, but he gets disappointed. His mom overdoses and the Peggots are getting old and don’t feel capable of taking in Damon.

So now he is a real orphan, working on a farm for a bit of food and a filthy cold bed. They even have to work the tobacco fields where he ends up to get Nicotin poisoning from working without gloves.

He changes to Middle School and is respected by the kids because of his tall size, his skills in drawing, and friendship to Fast Forward who is a famous footballer. He changes foster family and it gets worse, another family who takes in a foster because of the money the states pays them to feed the boy. There Demon sleeps in the laundry room and almost starves the whole time. They get him a job at the back of a small shop along the highway who set up a service, people can drop of their garbage there against a small fee and so they don’t have to drive all the way to the landfill and recycling facilities. Demons job is it to sort through the garbage, separate materials, compact stuff and drain batteries. He starts eating whatever edible scraps he finds, it is truly heartbreaking. The place seems to be a cover for a meth lab where they use battery acid, run by a friend of Stoner’s, if I understood correctly.

He manages to save up some money and then decides to run away from his misery, hitchhiking to Murder Valley, Tennessee, to find his grandmother. After another couple of bad experiences where you wonder if it ever stops getting worse, he finds his grandmother, Betsy Wooddall. She is a peculiar woman but helps Damon, gives him food, a good bed and serious conversation. She tells him he looks just like his father. Betsy is seen as an old witch but she has raised many children and relatives in a strict but just manner. She agrees to see what she can do to help Demon and finds him a place with the man who is the coach of the famous high school football team the Generals. He has a huge house where he lives with his daughter called Angus and a woman who is employed to cook and clean.

Coach Winfield has a jealous assistant called U-Haul who is eager to please coach to get some of his fame and money. Demon doesn’t trust him from the beginning. Coach is a great coach, he even starts practise with Demon before he has the age to make the football team, but he also has a problem with booze and spends the evenings closed in his office at home leaving the children on their own in the castle like house with an American Express credit card. At school Demon studies the bare minimum but connects with his English teacher Lewis Armstrong who tells the class about Appalachia’s history, about the mining and the workers and peoples dreams and fights for recognition. Armstrong’s girlfriend is the art teacher who sees Demons talent and together they try to keep Demon engaged in his education while he becomes a football star, goes to parties, gets into alcohol and interested in girls.

I won’t go on retelling everything, but long story short Damon gets into drugs, he has been sniffing cleaning products from an early age just to try it, as most kids do, then got to taste joints and pills at the farm with Fast Forward. He gets heavily into opioids, and in the book it is very understandable, giving his suffering throughout his life and a severe knee injury when he is a football player at High School. Things gets heavy and deep and harsh for Demon and his girlfriend, and eventually as well for Emmy Peggot. people die, but in the end there is hope.

- I did some research on this place and the opioid crisis, well mostly through Youtube videos, a lot of it is actually pretty well explained in the novel.

The place was busy and abundant when the mines were open, even though mining is work that destroys peoples health and workers were just workers, ants for the powerful companies who owned the mines and a also owned a lot of the rest of the land and the towns. But they made good money back then. The people were left behind after the mining industries shut down, they was nowhere to find other jobs, many people filed disability because of bad lungs and bad backs. The tobacco industry stopped being profitable when anti-tobacco laws got introduced in 2004. Most people there grew tobacco as an additional income source on small patches of flat land they had. Now they were paid small compensations not to grow tobacco, but people cannot live from that. In that scene of poverty, unemployment come the Pharma companies smelling money. This remote place in the Appalachian valleys has a very small number of doctors for a lot of sick people. Aunt June Peggot is a nurse and she witnesses how hard people have to fight for even minimal health care. And she witnesses the Painkiller industry taking advantage of that. As we all know the US health system is one of the worst, in the sense that it is highly capitalistic and not designed to cater to the financially weak. Prescribing pills is a lot cheaper than physical therapy or surgery or anything else, so they only cover that.

It worked like that, people in chronic pain would go to see a doctor and the doctor would not be able to make follow up appointments, not seeing the same patient again in six months or so, so they prescribe painkillers in big quantity despite the known risks of dependency. In the novel Demon’s girlfriend’s Dad is dying and his palliative care consists of nurses coming around every know and then giving out fentanyl patches, leaving the rest of the care to his daughter. Pain clinics were set up, places where doctors do nothing else but renew opioid prescriptions against money. People start selling a bit of their pills to pay the rent, buyers never fail.

Wikipedia says: “Between 1991 and 2011, painkiller prescriptions in the U.S. tripled from 76 million to 219 million per year. In 2016, more than 289 million prescriptions were written for opioid drugs.”

A big-pharma company called Purdue marketed the Oxycontin pills referring pain as the 5th vital sign, and telling people the risk of addiction was minimal. Insurance companies don’t cover or only very minimally cover rehab and rehab medication costs which makes it even harder for the doctors and the affected people.

In the end Aunt June tells Demon addiction is a disease and this disease was brought on him, it was not his fault.

Although the descriptions of drug use and all the social implications of it are devastating and even shocking the novel is a great read, not only in the educational sense, there is a lot of action and emotional engagement. It is a coming of age story but is so much more, it draws a whole panorama of what society is like in the Appalachians. Despite everything it is a place with kind-hearted down to earth people which I actually would love to visit one day.

What didn’t I like? I thought while it is overall a great novel with gripping unique characters, Angus seemed a bit too perfect, and U-Hauls evilness doesn’t get an explanation.

Want to learn more interesting stuff, google who the Melungeons were or are.

The novel was listed for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and won the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction. The author who in her interviews comes across as a very likable lady, donates some of the sales money from the novel to drug addiction recovery facilities