Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

 Demon Copperhead is an imaginative retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, set in southwest Virginia.  Demon, born to an impoverished and addicted single mom, lives through a wicked stepfather and an uncaring foster care system, but also a usually caring neighbor and a supportive grandmother. He enjoys a brief career as a high school football hero, before suffering an injury for which he is prescribed pain-killers. This sends him into serious addiction, a brief life of crime, and heartbreak after his girl friend OD’s. He is saved, sort of, by a talent for drawing cartoon strips with redneck heroes.

There are several villains in this piece including the foster care system, the mining companies which devastate and then abandon Appalachia, and especially Big Pharma. Barbara Kingsolver does a marvelous job of stimulating thought about whether we in the 21st century have really escaped the horrors of Dickens’ nineteenth-century London.

Mary Jo Bane