Coach discovers Demon has a knack for football and fast-tracks him onto the team, and Demon’s days of starving and homelessness are behind him. The only downside is she has a strict “No Boys Allowed” policy.ĭemon’s grandma finds him a situation back in Lee County staying with its resident royalty, the coach of the local football team, who lives alone with his daughter, Angus, in a sprawling and dilapidated mansion.
After a series of ordeals that would turn Dante’s hair white, made all the more heartbreaking considering he’s still only 11, he does finally find his grandma. This decision puts Demon Copperhead‘s real action into play.
The story twists and turns through a variety of dark, dismal temporary situations until Demon finally makes a break for it, heading out for Murder Valley, Tennessee in search of his grandmother whose name he doesn’t even know. No one stays long at Creaky’s masochistic foster farm, so they’re separated before too long and Demon finds himself thrown back out into a cold, uncaring world. He first finds himself at a temporary foster facility, Creaky Farm, where he is forced to do brutal child labor picking tobacco, where he makes some additional foster family – Tommy, Swap-Out and Fast-Forward. Demon finds himself with a new abusive stepdad at home, Stoner, and the whimsical, innocent childhood afternoons wading through muddy creeks with his best friend Maggot vanish in the rearview, never to return.įrom there, the novel turns from grim to pitch black as Demon’s mom ends up dying of an overdose and he finds himself thrown into the merciless clutches of the foster system. It follows Demon as he crosses from child to juvenile delinquent after his mom falls into a bad relationship and gets herself hitched. With his mom in and out of rehab, Demon finds himself aged and wizened beyond his years, helping to take care of his mom and occasionally fending for himself with the aid of his kindly next door neighbors, the Paggetts.ĭemon Copperhead is rooted in all the sins, the troubles, the worries and the cares of Appalachia, which it details with unflinching, remorseless, pitiless clarity. It follows its titular hero, real name Damon Fields, practically from his birth to a poor single widowed teenager. The doggedness with which these social ills hang on, fang and claw, makes a social novel tackling these issues just as timely and as important as Dickens’ masterpiece.ĭemon Copperhead is an update of David Copperfield, translating Dickens’ London to Virginia. It breaks the heart and boggles the mind that so little has changed since the novel first published in 1849 even when so much else in life and the world is unrecognizable. It’s tragic that Charles Dickens’ story of orphans and urchins, child labor and prisons and the plight of the working class, David Copperfield, maps so neatly, and so completely, onto modern life.
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