Demon Copperhead

I finally finished my 2024 book list, and then of course found two more books that I read but forgot to add to my list. Whatever, bro. The past is past, and I’m not revisiting that list. 

I did, however, come up with a new way to organize my 2025 list, and to keep track of what I’m writing about as I write about it. I'm very pleased with this new system; very proud of myself. 

*****

Right now, I’m reading two books: Demon Copperhead (Barbara Kingsolver) and Lovely One (Ketanji Brown Jackson). Why two? Well, it’s because the latter is a hardcover actual book, and so I read it when and where I have good light. The former is on my Kindle so I read it in bed. It’s a good system, though I don’t think I could come up with two more different voices than Justice Jackson and Damon Fields aka Demon Copperhead, the first-person narrator of the eponymous novel. Sometimes it’s a little confusing to switch between the two.

Demon is as good as everyone says it is. I’ve read Dickens’ David Copperfield, which inspired Demon Copperhead, at least 8 times, and although I might normally take a dim view of fan fiction (“might” means “definitely would”), I found that fan fiction in the hands of someone like Zadie Smith (her 2005 novel On Beauty is based on E.M. Forster’s Howards End) or Barbara Kingsolver can be an art form all on its own, and I am thoroughly absorbed. I’m only about 10 percent into the book, but I already wish the very worst on the vile Stoner, Demon’s evil redneck Mr. Murdstone stepfather. 

*****

I wrote that a week or so ago, and then some other things came up, and now I’m back. I’m about 60 percent of the way through Demon, and I’m officially a fan of fan fiction. Stoner is out of the picture for now, and although he hasn’t yet gotten the comeuppance that he so richly deserves, I have faith that the comeuppance is imminent, and I eagerly await this evil man’s downfall. Of course, it will probably come at the expense of some other poor beautiful abused woman (girl, really), just as Mr. Murdstone married another very young woman after driving David’s poor mother to an early grave. 

As you have probably guessed, part of the fun of reading Demon Copperhead is the roman a clef exercise of figuring out who’s who. This is not hard for me, because I’ve read David Copperfield so gosh darn many times. There are a few characters that don’t have counterparts in the original, but most of Demon’s main characters are directly inspired by David Copperfield’s, and it’s pretty easy to identify everyone. The plot is also quite similar but modernized - Demon, like David, is orphaned young and ends up in rather terrible foster care situations until both boys are rescued by older relatives. But Demon takes place in rural Lee County (a real place) in western Virginia during the early part of the 21st century, and the characters’ lives are dominated not only by rigid social and economic structures, but by the then-new opioid epidemic. For the most part, the same people die but in very different circumstances. 

The first-person voices of the main characters are also very different. David “Trotwood” Copperfield is a proper Victorian. Damon “Demon Copperhead” Fields is a rough-edged and girl-crazy high school football player who is bluntly frank about sex and drugs and rural working class life. Dickens’ contemporary readers would have been shocked, but I don’t think that Dickens himself would have been.

*****

I’m almost at the end now. I’m still waiting for Stoner to get his just desserts, but it looks like the vile U-Haul Pyles (Uriah Heep) is about to get what’s coming to him, and that’s just as good. No additional spoilers, except to say that I think I know what’s going to happen to Angus and Dori and Fast Forward and the Armstrongs and Emmy and Hammer Kelly - for better or for worse - because I know what happened to the original characters who inspired them. And there’s still several chapters to go, so I’m not giving up on proper retribution for Stoner, either. I’m either going to speed through the final chapters right this minute, or I’m going to stretch this out for the rest of the week. And then I’m going to read David Copperfield again. It’s been a while.