Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2022 fiction)

The author lives with her family on a farm in southern Virginia. She has seen with her own eyes what the Oxycontin epidemic has done to the poor, under-employed and minimally educated people of Appalachia. Inspired to some extent by David Copperfield, we meet Damon (later Demon) on the day he was born in the bathroom of his mom’s trailer. Despite every obstacle, Demon persists through the death of his mother, the brutal treatment by his stepfather, horrors of foster placement, moments of glory on the football field, but eventually to fall into the clutches of drug addiction. These are endemic in his community thanks to the efforts of Big Pharma and the Sackler Family in particular which rewarded rural doctors for prescribing pain killing drugs. This book is a hard read, but an important one. We read in the newspapers about addiction problems. Kingsolver makes it personal by introducing us to Demon Copperhead. For more information on the Sackler Family, please read Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe.

Reviewed by Robin Olivier