Demon Copperhead

In short

What I liked

• All the pieces up in the air, spectacularly choreographed—inherited perhaps from the source material
• The language, colloquial but poetic
• Villains were oily and despicable

What could have been better

• Relationships between people were believable but lacked emotional resonance
• Demon (and maybe David before him) doesn’t evolve as a character

In review

I read a little bit of Charles Dickens in high school, and in university I purchased a really nice edition of A Tale of Two Cities which I enjoyed but which didn’t rock my world. Somehow I came by the opinion that Dickens wrote illuminating but fundamentally unexciting books about poverty and child labour and coal and grime, with matronly characters called Mrs. Flitterbottom caring for, and villains called Squenchton Crunchly conniving against, a child protagonist who, in spite of insurmountable adversity, triumphs through personal grit and principle.

That’s basically what’s going on here: Demon Copperhead is an Appalachian retelling of Dickens’s classic semi-autobiography David Copperfield, a book that I haven’t read but which by now I think I get the broad strokes of.

Our hero, Demon Copperhead (born Damon, a name that nearly no one uses with him), is born to an teenage mom in rural Lee County, Virginia in the late 1980s. His father is absent (dead, it turns out) and his mother has no business being a parent; Demon takes up the domestic slack. He spends his first ten years in crushing poverty but he meets hardship with equanimity and develops a frank, but never despairing, relationship with his position in life.

Like a little blue prizefighter. Those are the words she’d use later on, being not at all shy to discuss the worst day of my mom’s life. And if that’s how I came across to the first people that laid eyes on me, I’ll take it. To me that says I had a fighting chance. Long odds, yes I know. If a mother is lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they’re slapping the kid she’s shunted out, telling him to look alive: likely the bastard is doomed. Kid born to the junkie is a junkie. He’ll grow up to be everything you don’t want to know, the rotten teeth and dead-zone eyes, the nuisance of locking up your tools in the garage so they don’t walk off, the rent-by-the-week motel squatting well back from the scenic highway. This kid, if he wanted a shot at the finer things, should have got himself delivered to some rich or smart or Christian, nonusing type of mother. Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.

He grows up close with his neighbours the Peggots, and particularly with young Matthew Peggot (“Maggot” to Damon—I mean Demon). The difficulties of growing up with a mom who can’t look after herself matures Demon before his time, but he doesn’t fail to appreciate his childhood where he can: a love of comics, superheroes, and an abiding urge to see the ocean.

Me though, I was a born sucker for the superhero rescue. Did that line of work even exist, in our trailer-home universe? Had they all quit Smallville and gone looking for bigger action? Save or be saved, these are questions. You want to think it’s not over till the last page.

Things take a turn when his mom takes up with an abusive trucker called Murrel “Stoner” Stone and relapses into drug use; when she dies of an overdose, Demon is turned over to the foster system at eleven years old. His case workers are by turns inexperienced, optimistic, wilfully ignorant, and worn thin that they can’t muster the effort to care. Demon is shunted between foster families—first to a farmer who uses (eleven-year-old) foster boys as free labour on his tobacco plantation, where he meets the charismatic but unscrupulous Sterling “Fast Forward” Ford and the totally incorruptible Tommy “Waddles” Waddell. When the tobacco harvest is over, the farm no longer has need for him and he’s turned over to a poor family who force Demon to take up a part-time job to help them make ends meet (again, the boy is eleven years old) sorting trash behind a meth lab (at eleven).

When I was eleven years old, I went to Club Med with my family. When Demon is eleven, he learns hard lessons about chance, about relying on other people, and about his place in American society and among the people he grew up with—but never loses his conscientious streak. He also gets nicotine poisoning.

The villains of these sections—first the tobacco plantation owner, then the operator of te meth lab, and, in an oblique sense, his foster family—are driven to oiliness in turns by desperation and sheer malice, and while the misery that they inflict on Demon’s life is inarguable, the fire inside of him never really seems at risk of going out. Maybe that’s just the nature of the character, both here and in Dickens’s original, but it serves almost to declaw the awful stuff that happens to him.

When his foster family finally hits financial rock bottom and decides to alight for Ohio, Demon runs away to Tennessee, where he suspects he may have a living relative. His trip to Murder Valley, TN is the stuff of American nightmares: long empty roads, truck stops populated by the desperate and bored, nights spent in the sticky runoff of fast food dumpsters. At length he finds his grandmother on his father’s side, a knot of an old woman who helps raise young girls and who has low opinions of men in general. She doesn’t intend to raise Demon herself but puts him in touch with a family back in Lee County who can take care of him: Coach Winfield and his daughter Angus.

Winfield is the coach of the local high school football team and a minor local celebrity; Angus (born Agnes) is a toughie with principles that Demon really connects with. In the Winfield house, Demon’s fortunes turn around: Coach sticks with him and Agnes grows to be a close friend and confidante. He finds a mentor in his progressive guidance counselor Mr. Strong, and starts to develop an keen sense of the social injustice perpetrated against the people of Appalachia. As Demon moves into high school, Winfield trains him as a tight end for the Lee County Generals, thereby reaching the upper echelons of high school society.

Fortunes turn again on a rough tackle and a broken leg; Demon is prescribed opioid painkillers in the aftermath and develops a dependence that erodes his comfortable life out from under him. At the same time, Coach Winfield’s latent alcoholism worsens and the assistant manager of the football team takes progressive financial advantage of the situation. Fast Forward, from back on the tobacco plantation, re-enters his life and Demon eagerly takes up with him again, even as it becomes clearer and clearer how Fast Forward uses and abuses everyone who puts their confidence in him—culminating in the all-but-abduction one of the Peggot relatives, Demon’s erstwhile crush Emmy.

Around the same time, Demon enters his first proper relationship with Dori Spencer, the first new character in like 300 pages. Demon is smitten at first sight. Dori’s life revolves around her terminally-ill father, at once caring for him and stealing his prescriptions to consume recreationally. When her father dies, Demon and Dori move in together and Demon finds himself on the cusp of an adulthood he was truly not prepared for.

The one light in his world is a burgeoning partnership with Tommy Waddell (also of the tobacco plantation), who’s now working at a local paper and with whom Demon starts publishing a comic about an Appalachia-themed superhero, to critical local acclaim.

This doesn’t stave off the worst, when it comes:

It was April, not quite a year after Vester, and it happened the way I knew it would. I came home and found her. [...]

I almost didn’t feel anything at first, cleaning her up like I’d done so many times, getting her decent. And then the house, cleaning up her mess and her kit. Hiding stuff, before I made any calls. There were few to make. Thelma had run out of reasons to know her. Like everybody else. I had no wish to see the aunt again, but the EMTs said they had to get hold of next of kin, so I turned over Dori’s phone. Aunt Fred was in the contacts. I’d erased some other number first, but nobody cared to track down any mysteries. Another OD in Lee County. There’d been hundreds.

And just like that, I was “the boy that went in there and found her.”

Without much of a reason to keep living, Demon moves in to a drug house and spends his days only semiconscious. This meagre existence is interrupted by a scheme to bring him low before Fast Forward at the place where his father died, a local waterfall and swimming hole. However, a complex set of circumstances, including a raging storm and the presence of a Peggot relative with a big gun, lead to the (to be fair, blameless) death of the relative and of Fast Forward himself—which for Demon marks rock bottom.

The choreography of rock bottom, over the last 120 pages or so, is something to behold from a technical perspective. Demon’s relationship with Dori, his partnership with Tommy Traddles, the abduction of Emmy Peggot, and the ongoing misery of unbreakable addiction—all are held aloft with Demon’s head just barely above the water. And while they’re resolved separately, it never feels like tying up narrative loose ends. Things eventuate mostly naturally.

With nearly nothing left to lose, Demon enters a halfway house on the urging of his sort-of-aunt (it’s a long story) June Peggot to get clean to get his life back on track. Not another ordeal on the long list, his term at the halfway house comes to him almost as a vacation from the rough life he’s led to this point. Almost as a reward. Unburdened by addiction, he starts a webcomic and finds a measure of inner peace. He reconnects with Angus, who has, throughout it all, made herself available as a friend and confidante, the one steady presence in his life. Together they set out on a trip to finally see the ocean.