Matty Byloos
In One Note, Gabriel Blackwell asks writers to talk about the book they are currently reading and why. One Note 024: Matty Byloos, Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time.
In One Note, I ask writers for just that: one note, a single paragraph, on what they’re reading right now.
Today’s note comes courtesy of Matty Byloos:
This will probably say more about me than his book, and if anyone knows me even the slightest then this is more than obvious, but in Donald Ray Pollock’s The Devil All the Time, I find some weird kind of cozy home feeling, like a favorite chair and favorite pair of shoes and favorite sweater all wrapped into one, along with maybe a favorite bowl of soup. It’s the first book I’ve read in a long time where I feel the strength of the language, of the characters and their indirect and direct development, of the form and complexities of weaving multiple story-lines through many decades of time and history, and lastly, of the subject — which in my estimation, is chiefly the notion that in all of us, there is an evil that is barely kept at bay. Sure, there are serial killers. A couple, even. And there’s revenge or vengeance. And there is love, mostly of a forbidden or compromised nature. And the passage of time and what it does to all of those things as they slip into flawed or inexact memory. Pollock’s novel is an amazing project. I hardly have time for ANYTHING anymore in the way of life’s simple pleasures, and the book forced itself, quite literally, into the spare minutes of my days, asking to be embraced and analyzed, all in a very short amount of time. Suffice it to say, if you’re working on a novel, you could do a lot worse things than pick up this book and study it for what it does right.
Matty Byloos’s first collection of short stories, Don’t Smell the Floss, was published in 2009 by Write Bloody Books. His work has been published or is forthcoming in: Everyday Genius, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, Matchbook, Stoked, Bomb Blog’s Word Choice, and more. He is the editor and publisher of Smalldoggies Magazine. His first novel, It Has Always Been the End, will be released on Housefire Publishing in 2012.
