Bayou Pages | “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver

review by Meredith McKinnie

“The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.”

In the summer of 2024, NYTimes readers chose Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead as the best book of the 21st century, and I can see why. Channeling Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Kingsolver tells the story of Damon, nicknamed Demon for his shockingly red hair and biting attitude, tragically born to a teen meth addict and left for dead. Living off and on with the Peggots, the family of his best friend Maggot (you read that right), and his mother’s abusive boyfriend, Demon eventually becomes a ward of the state, volleying from sad household to sadder situations. The tragedies that await Demon showcase the violent underbelly of the child welfare system, especially in underfunded and ignored Appalachia. And while this story sounds sad (and it is) and hard it read (it can be), Kingsolver manages to lure us in via Demon’s witty and sharp intuition, ferocious spirit, and humorous voice; one of Demon’s observations reads, “All God’s children have to take a ****, but you’d never know it from the way they treat the ones who have to clean it up.” Demon is the personification of the Appalachian stereotype, and we root for him anyway. 

Demon finds joy in his Marvel drawings and football. When he lucks out staying with a famed high school coach, becomes starting running back, and unsurprisingly, suffers an injury; the unrelenting football network of coaches and doctors prescribe OxyContin to get Demon back on the field. You know where this story is headed. Wanting only to be loved and to prove himself worthy, Demon spins into addiction, violence, and wasted chances. Kingsolver takes us into the reality of Appalachia, typically the butt of all jokes, to counter that reputation with the truth of its origins. Yes, these people are poor (and here’s why). Yes, these people are addicts (and here’s why). Yes, these people make poor choices (and here’s why). Kingsolver poses and responds to questions about poverty, addiction, education, the opioid crisis, and child-welfare services in a stunningly powerful narrative about a compelling, soul-tugging American boy. 

Kingsolver’s phenomenal prose proves powerful in all her fiction books, as she takes readers not just into a place and a story, but inside her characters’ minds. She writes a teenaged boy as if she once was one, and defends her home (as she still lives in Appalachia) with the heart of one invested in its restoration. Demon Copperhead won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction along with the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Kingsolver’s work also includes The Poisonwood Bible (1998), The Lacuna (2009), and my favorite Flight Behavior (2012). Her work and advocacy focus on social and environmental issues and defending America’s “flyover country.”  

“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.”