Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Emily Rose
Dec 23, 2023
4 min read

Knoxville, Tennessee

Just a couple days ago, I announced The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride as my favorite book of 2023. It’s been a good end of the year reading-wise, because now I think Demon Copperhead has tied it. This book is phenomenal! I can see why it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year. This book is modeled off of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens but from the perspective of an Appalachian boy growing up in the 90’s and early 2000’s.

The main character of this story is “Demon” Damon Fields (his “other” last name is Copperhead, his deceased father’s last name - i.e. Demon Copperhead). His father died before he was born due to a (likely drug-induced) drowning incident. His mother has been in and out of rehab throughout Demon’s life, but she cherishes Damon and does her best to give him a good life. More details with spoilers will be below, but the novel follows his life until his early 20s. Damon struggles with CPS, foster care, hunger, health issues, and addiction in poverty-stricken Lee County, Virginia. Kingsolves does an incredible job with character development, giving color and depth to each character introduced. Damon is bitter but witty with his commentary as narrator, but he also beautifully and profoundly describes things such as:

“Mom always saying she wouldn’t be caught dead in a church. And here she was, losing

every battle right now to the end, in a white casket from Walmart, the other place she most hated to be, (108).

A good portion of this book also talks about structural poverty and why Appalachia is shat on so much. It was really cool to see the characters explore that, including through a comic authored and illustrated by Damon and his friend Tommy called Red Neck. Although I (a middle class white person raised in the Northeast) continue to struggle with not judging the people of Appalachia for shooting themselves in the foot, being bigoted (racism was discussed very little in this novel), I really resonated with this passage:

“[The government] was always on the side of the money-earning people, and down on the land people due to…money earning-ones pay taxes. Whereas you can’t collect shit on what people grow and eat on the spot, or the work they swap with their neighbors…So, the ones in charge started cooking it into everybody’s brains to look down on the land people, saying we are an earlier stage of human.”

I wonder how much judgment I feel towards people of Appalachia comes from this cultural misrepresentation. However, I have lived in (relatively urban) southwestern Virginia for 7 years now, so I’m not completely ignorant about the ways of people around here. And it is a little less romantic than Kingsolver’s description above. But I liked how she weaved the country’s opinions about Appalachia into the novel without getting on too high of a soap box.

On to the spoilers parts:

—------------------------------- Spoilers Ahead —------------------------------------

Dori’s arc was heartbreaking. She reminded me so much of my ex, although he luckily never got into hard drugs while he was with me. My ex moved from Massachusetts to Virginia to be with me after I’d been living in Virginia for a few months. There were not nearly the same resources in the town I was living (mainly a public transportation system), so my carless ex-boyfriend found it very difficult to find a job. This completely decimated his mental health, and I had to work two jobs to keep us afloat and work as hard as I could to keep him alive..mainly by giving him anything and everything he wanted at any moment (mostly weed and snacks). I was so desperate to keep working harder and harder so that he would finally be happy, but he constantly talked of killing himself. Every day that I came home from work, I was expecting to find him dead on the couch. Damon described a similar feeling: “The night I found Dori, I hate to say, some part of me was relieved, thinking now I wouldn’t have to worry every minute about her dying,” (478).

I can’t get Fast Forward’s death out of my head. I thought it was so poetic, Fast Forward going from being a hero/father figure to Damon seeing him as the jerk he was, then dying in the same way Damon’s biological father died. Chefs kiss

I’m not going to lie, Damon getting together with his foster sister weirds me out a little. I know they’re not technically related, and she is one of the only positive role models in his life that was his own age, but it still weirded me out. I think they do better as friends/siblings.

This will be a book that I will think about for years to come. Also I’ve been wanting to go to the Devil’s Bathtub for a long time now, and this book made me want to put that on the list for this spring (but not during a torrential downpour!). Just look at this place!