Summary: Demon Copperhead

The GIST

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is a big, furious, funny novel about a boy born with nothing in the mountains of southwest Virginia, told in his own unforgettable voice. Published in 2022, it shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, won the Women's Prize for Fiction (making Kingsolver the first author to take that prize twice) and was an Oprah's Book Club pick. Readers of The New York Times later voted it their number one book of the century so far.

The idea behind it is as bold as it is simple. Kingsolver took Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, a novel that grew out of its author's own experience of poverty and what it does to children, and carried its plot and its people across an ocean and a century and a half to Lee County, Virginia, in the years when prescription painkillers flooded Appalachia. The orphan is still an orphan. The cruel stepfather, the charming false friend, the slimy schemer and the steadfast girl are all here under new names. You do not need to have read a page of Dickens to follow it. What Kingsolver borrows from him, above all, is his anger, his compassion and his faith in what a good story can do. She dedicates the book to the survivors.

The Story

Damon Fields arrives in the world on the floor of a single-wide trailer, born to an eighteen-year-old mother with a drug habit and delivered with the help of the neighbor, Mrs. Peggot. His father is already dead, drowned the summer before at a swimming hole called the Devil's Bathtub, a place that will shadow the boy for the rest of the story. From that father, who was Melungeon, he inherits dark skin, light eyes and hair the color of copper wire. Add a certain attitude, and Damon becomes Demon Copperhead. Because he was born still inside the birth sac, he is told he can never drown. He grows up besotted with the color blue and with an ocean he has never seen.

He tells us early how he reads the odds: "the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose." Still, his first years have their sweetness. The trailer sits on the property of Mr. and Mrs. Peggot, who are raising their grandson Matt, known as Maggot, because Maggot's mother is in prison. The two boys are the same age and inseparable, and the Peggots feed and watch over Demon as if he were theirs. On a trip with them to Knoxville he meets their daughter June, a nurse, and her adopted girl Emmy, and is dazzled by both.

Then his mother takes up with a trucker named Stoner, who is hard and controlling and soon turns his fists on the boy. While Demon is away in Knoxville, she marries him. Things get worse. She slides back into drugs and overdoses, and while she is sent to rehab Demon gets his first taste of the foster system.

That taste is Creaky Farm, where an old tobacco farmer named Crickson takes in boys because they are free labor, and treats them just well enough to keep social services from looking closely. Demon cuts tobacco, sleeps rough and goes underfed. The other boys are his education. Tommy, gentle and anxious, doodles skeletons to calm himself, and Demon wins his loyalty for life by drawing comics that turn Tommy into a superhero. Swap-Out is the most damaged of them. And over all of them rules Fast Forward, the handsome quarterback of the Lee High Generals, whose charm is so complete that the younger boys hand him their money and follow him into their first pill parties without a second thought.

Not long after, Demon's mother, pregnant again, overdoses on OxyContin a second time, and this time she does not survive it. He is in elementary school and alone. He begs the Peggots to adopt him. They love him, and they are too old, and they say no. It is one of the cruellest moments in the book because nobody in it is cruel.

His next home is with the McCobbs, a family forever short of money who take him for the foster payments, bed him down in the laundry room where the dog used to sleep and let him go hungry. To pay his way he sorts garbage behind a gas station for a man whose real business appears to be a meth lab. He goes to fifth grade dirty and is mocked for the smell. When the McCobbs lose their house and another placement looms, Demon runs.

He hitchhikes to Murder Valley, Tennessee, looking for the one relative he has heard of: his father's mother, Betsy Woodall, a tough old woman who lives with her disabled brother Dick, a gentle soul who writes lines of Shakespeare on a huge kite. Betsy has spent her life helping girls, not boys, but she makes an exception. She pulls strings back in Lee County, and Demon lands, astonishingly, in the big house of Coach Winfield, who runs the high school football team.

For the first time he has a real bed, decent clothes and enough to eat. Coach drinks too much, but he sees that the boy is big and fast with good hands, and turns him into a tight end. Coach's daughter Agnes, called Angus, is unlike any girl Demon has known: blunt, original, uninterested in fitting in, and the closest thing to a sister he has ever had. At school, Mr. Armstrong, a Black teacher who tells his students about the mountain people who fought for the Union, takes an interest in him, and Armstrong's wife Annie, the art teacher, tells Demon that the drawing he has always done for comfort is a real gift. Hovering around the Winfield house is Coach's assistant U-Haul, all fake humility and wandering hands, whom nobody trusts and nobody removes.

Demon becomes a star. In a football town that means he becomes a hero, and for a couple of seasons the boy nobody wanted is wanted by everyone. Then a tackle wrecks his knee. He needs surgery. What he gets, from a team doctor who also runs the local pill mill, is pain management, so that he can get back on the field: OxyContin. June Peggot, who has moved home and can see exactly what these drugs are doing to her patients, warns him. It makes no difference. He is hooked within weeks.

Around the same time he falls hard for Dori, the fragile, pretty daughter of the man who owns the farm supply store where he works. She has left school to nurse her dying father, and she has been helping herself to his medication. Love and drugs arrive together, and Demon cannot tell them apart. When her father dies, he drops out of school and moves in with her, and the two of them sink: jobs gained and lost, a filthy house, each day organized around the next dose. Meanwhile Fast Forward is back, as magnetic as ever, and Emmy, the girl Demon has adored since childhood, is drawn into his orbit. Maggot, bullied and adrift, is in trouble of his own.

By now Demon has watched the people around him go under one after another. He has a talent, a handful of people who refuse to give up on him, and a stubbornness that has kept him alive this far. Whether those are enough against the tide is the question that carries the book to its end.

What It's Really About

Kingsolver's subject is institutional poverty and what it does to children. Every system that should catch Demon lets him fall: overworked caseworkers who do not look, foster parents in it for the check, schools with nothing to spare, a football program that makes a boy a god and then throws him away, doctors who hand a teenager a bottle of pills. The opioid epidemic is shown from the inside. In Lee County, where coal and tobacco have faded and left little work behind, drug companies sold doctors on a painkiller they claimed was not addictive, and people lined up for their prescriptions. Asked whether a certain girl is using, Demon answers that he knows nobody who is not.

It is equally a book about being looked down on. Demon knows what the rest of the country thinks of hillbillies and has a line for it: "You get to a point of not giving a damn over people thinking you're worthless. Mainly by getting there first yourself." Kingsolver, who has deep ties to the region, writes against that contempt. Her Appalachia is beautiful and bound by loyalty, a place whose people are too often stereotyped or ignored, where those with the least give the most. For all its villains, the novel is crowded with big hearts: the Peggots, June, Angus, Annie and her husband, Tommy.

Above all, readers love the voice. Demon is caustic, tender, hilarious and wide open, and critics called the book equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking. His gift for drawing, and his lifelong habit of making superheroes out of the people he loves, becomes a thread about the power of telling your own story when popular culture has left your kind out of the picture.

Not everyone is persuaded. One prominent review called the novel poverty porn that turns Appalachians into objects of pity, and some readers find the long middle stretch of addiction relentless. Most come away feeling they have rarely rooted for a character so hard.

Who Should Read It

Read this if you love big, immersive, character-driven novels with a narrator you will not forget, or if you want to understand the opioid crisis and rural poverty through a human story instead of a headline. Fans of Dickens will enjoy spotting the parallels, and newcomers lose nothing. At well over 500 pages, with child neglect, abuse and addiction on nearly all of them, it asks a lot of you. It gives back more.