Literature / Demon Copperhead

Demon Copperhead is a 2022 novel by Barbara Kingsolver.

It is in fact an update of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield, set in 20th and 21st century Appalachia. The protagonist is one Damon Fields, who gets the nickname "Demon Copperhead", the former a nickname for "Damon" and the latter coming from his red hair. The plot follows David Copperfield pretty closely, right down to Damon being born with a caul like David Copperfield was—except Damon is born to a teenaged mother who lives alone in a trailer park and has struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction. "Mom" Fields tries to stay sober and keep her job at Walmart so she can look after David, and her neighbors the Peggots (taken from the Peggotys in David Copperfield) try and help her out. But when Mom marries an abusive, thoroughly evil truck driver, Murrell Stone aka "Stoner" (Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield) things get much worse for young Damon.

The story plays out from there, as the novel uses the framework of David Copperfield to examine life in Appalachia, focusing on the region's endemic poverty, and the devastation of the opioid crisis.

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Tropes:

• Adaptational Name Change: Except for Mr. Dick, almost every character gets their name tweaked to something one might hear in Appalachia. Uriah Heep becomes "Ryan Piles."
• Adaptational Relationship Change: In David Copperfield, Betsey Trotwood, who eventually takes David in, is his great-aunt. The character in this book that corresponds to her is Betsy Woodall, Damon's paternal grandmother.
• The Alcoholic: Coach Wickfield, Angus's father and Damon's guardian, who, when he isn't coaching the high school football team, is drinking too much. This is how U-Haul gets his hooks into Coach for a time.
• Auto Erotica: How Damon and Dori lose their virginities together, in a scene that is romantic and also ominous as Dori shows him that she's familiar with IV drug use.
• Bald of Evil: Just one of the many signs that Stoner is bad news is how he keeps his head completely shaved. Damon compares him to Mr. Clean, except that Stoner also has a...
  • Beard of Evil: Stoner pairs that shaved head with a great big black beard, the combination of which just makes him more intimidating.
• Bathroom Stall of Overheard Insults: Discussed Trope. Damon, who loathes jokes about rednecks and hillbillies, compares such humor to someone in a bathroom stall hearing insults, then says, of hillbilly America, "We can actually hear you."
• A Birthday, Not a Break: Damon is called to the principal's office on his 11th birthday. He thinks his mother has sent him a present. Instead he's told that she's died of a drug overdose.
• Bland-Name Product: One of the sub-themes of the book is how the rest of America demeans and insults the people of Appalachia as hillbillies and rednecks. Tommy, who has gotten a job at the local newspaper, takes particular offense at a newspaper comic called Stumpy Fiddles that is nothing more than a collection of lazy, insulting hillbilly stereotypes. Stumpy Fiddles is an obvious analog of Real Life comic Snuffy Smith.
  Damon: "Stumpy fucking Fiddles is garbage."
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Damon is offended when he goes to Dr. Watts's pill mill, and Watts, the man who as team physician got him hooked on oxy in the first place, doesn't even recognize him.
• Cat Fight: Damon actually uses the word "catfight" to describe seeing "Rose Darrell with a fistful of hair, and Emmy on the other end of it." Damon and Maggot break up the nasty fight.
• Country Mouse: Little Damon, who has been growing up in a trailer in the sticks, is thoroughly ill at ease when he's taken to visit some Peggot relations in Knoxville. He is shocked by the very idea of an apartment building, of the endless rows of doors that all open onto the same hallway, and how no one has a yard.
  Where would these people grow their tomatoes?
  • Later, Damon is shocked to find out that some places have garbage trucks, rather than everyone hauling their garbage to a landfill.
  • When Betsey starts looking for a place to put Damon, he specifically says he doesn't want to go to any city. When he briefly stays in Richmond, he can't believe how close the houses are to each other.
• Cue the Rain: Damon's desperate flight to find his grandmother goes bad when he's robbed at a truck stop. He gets a ride for a little while but the driver drops him off, and he's left abandoned again on the side of the road, without a penny. And then it starts to rain.
• Department of Child Disservices: A sad, realistic example. When Damon comes into the system, the Department of Social Services is horribly overworked and underfunded. DSS mostly forgets about Damon because there are so many children; they know that Mr. Crickson aka "Creaky" takes in kids solely for the check and to use them as slave labor on his farm, but they still send Damon there because there's just nowhere else he can go. Damon's case worker Miss Barks means well but really is just marking time until she can go to college and get a teaching degree; she completely forgets about getting Damon clothes before sending him to Creaky's farm, and when she finally remembers weeks later and says that she'll get his clothes Damon boggles at how he would have been living in filthy rags for weeks if he'd depended on her. When she tells him that she's quitting the DSS to become an elementary school teacher, Damon thinks ruefully about how DSS pays so little that the only people it attracts are losers and burnouts.
• Dramatic Sit-Down: Betsy Woodall does this when a filthy, bedraggled Damon makes to her house after a long and difficult journey, finds her in the front yard, and announces that he is her grandson, whom she has never met.
  "Oh, lord," she said. And sat down upon the ground.
• Dr. Feelgood: Dr. Watts, the football team's physician, is a little too eager to prescribe Damon the opioids that, sure enough, he gets hooked on. Later, Damon finds out that Dr. Watts runs a pill mill that caters to oxy addicts.
• Edgy Backwards Chair-Sitting:
  • Stoner does this when he comes home from work, on the same day that Damon has come home from foster care. "He turned one of the kitchen chairs around and sat in it backward, straddling it with his arms folded on the back." It's a clear effort to intimidate his 10-year-old stepson.
  • Much later, after Damon says "You hate Dori, don't you?", Angus does this. Damon reflects on when Stoner did it and how two people couldn't be any more different, before Angus tells the truth: no, she likes Dori, because Dori makes Damon happy.
• The Eeyore: Mrs. Gummidge, the Peggot's downstairs neighbor, who "has a downer comment for every occasion." When someone suggests that the Christmas tree is pretty, Mrs. Gummidge says maybe, but they start fires. If someone says the summer has been warm, Mrs. Gummidge says that it means a long winter.
• Fan Disservice: When Damon and June find Emmy in a drug den in Atlanta. Emmy is out cold, along with another woman. Emmy is wearing no top, and the other woman is wearing no bottom. Damon thinks of them as two Barbie dolls each sharing half of the same outfit.
• Girls with Moustaches: Damon observes that his grandmother Betsey has a wispy mustache. It's part of her persona—six feel tall, strong personality, scary.
• Guess Who I'm Marrying?: Damon is horrified, after coming home from a couple of weeks with the Peggots, to discover that his mother has married the monstrous Stoner. At one point when Stoner is being an abusive asshole and yelling at Damon and Mom, Damon reflects that his sympathy for Mom was dwindling as it was her fault in the first place for marrying him.
• Glasgow Grin: One chapter tells the story of why Damon's best friend Matty Peggot (aka "Maggot") has a mother in jail. It seems that Matty's father, who was even more abusive than Damon's stepfather, once said she should smile more. So when she'd finally had enough, she took a razor blade and slashed a smile into his cheeks.
• Hangover Sensitivity: Damon wakes up suffering terribly after a night of binge drinking, a night where he learned unpleasant things about Fast Forward. Angus takes care of him, stripping him out of his puke-spattered clothes and putting him to bed.
• Letting Her Hair Down: In the last chapter. Damon finally meets Angus again after several years. He compliments her on her hat, and she takes it off. It seems to be the first time Damon sees her as a woman: "Set free, her hair sprang into action, somehow girlier than it used to be."
• Love at First Sight: Damon when he first meets Dori: "One look at her and I was gone. This is the truth, it was first sight."
• Mister Muffykins: Damon hates Dora's loud, yapping, bitey little "rat's ass" of a dog, Jip. (Dora's Jip from David Copperfield may be the Trope Maker.)
• Mythology Gag:
  • Mr. Dick flies a kite on which he writes "Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel. I can always be hopeful of you." These are words said by Betsey Trotwood to David in David Copperfield, the book this one is adapted from.
  • This is more overt later when teenaged Damon, who has mostly tuned out of high school, says he liked a book by...Charles Dickens.
  ...seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat's ass. You'd think he was from around here.
• No Full Name Given: Damon's mother gave him her maiden name of Fields, but he only ever calls her Mom.
• Offscreen Teleportation: Part of the profound creepiness of Ryan Piles aka "U-Haul" (the Uriah Heep character). Damon describes how U-Haul suddenly shows up in the den while he and Angus were watching TV.
  U-Haul never came into a room, he materialized.
• Off the Wagon: Stoner's cruelty and abuse towards Damon drives Damon's mom into a gin-and-pills relapse.
• Orphan's Ordeal: Damon first goes into the system when his mother goes into rehab and officially becomes an orphan when she dies of an overdose. He spends years being abused, exploited, humiliated, and half-starved, while the Department of Child Disservices remains largely indifferent.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: A Running Gag with Damon, who is smart, but ignorant of the wider world.
  • Damon misses Mouse's allusion to a famous movie, in an exchange that also foreshadows Fast Forward's pursuit of Emmy.
  I told Fast Forward I was sorry he didn't get to talk to June or Emmy.
  Mouse asked if we were discussing Mrs. Robinson and Elaine, and I told her I didn't know them. "Are they Lee County Robinsons?"
  She snorted.
  • Angus says Damon, whose knee was never properly treated, is still limping around "like Quasimodo". Damon's angry response is "I don't really know who that is, but thanks."
  • Near the end, June says that Emmy is living in Asheville with other girls in recovery, in a building where Grace Kelly once lived.
  I didn't know who that was, but acted impressed.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: The book follows the plot of David Copperfield pretty closely, but adapting Dickens's Doorstopper of a novel required some edits. In Dickens, Mr. Murdstone has an awful bitch of a sister, Jane Murdstone, who contributes to making David and Clara's lives miserable. In this novel, Murrell Stone has no sister and torments Mom and Damon all by himself.
• Raging Stiffie: Damon has to deal with this when he falls in adolescent love with Emily, while they are both staying with the Peggots.
  Now all I had to do was think of Emmy, her face or her toothpaste smell, and it would give me these waking-up feelings as regards the guy downstairs.
• Setting Update: David Copperfield moved to turn-of-the-21st-century Appalachia.
• Sexy Sweater Girl: Young Damon has a crush on his social worker, Miss Barks. He observes her "white sweater that seriously put all the lady parts on notice."
• Shout-Out: Mr. Dick flies kites with Shakespeare quotes written on them. ("I am determined to prove a villain, and hate the idle pleasures of these days.")
• Snow Means Love: It's snowing as Damon and Angus drive to the ocean together on the last page of the book, Damon having finally realized that she loves him and they are meant to be together.
• Title Drop: At the end of Chapter 2, when Damon says that the kids at school turned "Damon" into "Demon", and he also started getting called "Copperhead" due to his wiry reddish hair, and that he was OK with the combination "Demon Copperhead".
  You can't deny, it's got a power to it.
• Tomboyish Name: Coach Winfield's daughter, the character that corresponds with David Copperfield's Agnes Wickfield, is named Angus. That combined with the shapeless clothes she's wearing causes Damon to mistake her for a boy at first meeting, leaving him extremely embarrassed when he finds out. (Later Damon finds out that in fact her name is "Agnes" and Angus was a first-grade insult from other kids that Agnes/Angus adopted as her own nickname.)
• While You Were in Diapers: June the nurse practitioner does not think Dr. Watts is managing Damon's knee injury correctly. Coach Winfield gets defensive, saying "Watts has been a doctor since you were cheerleadin' in your little skirt and bobby socks."
• Whole-Plot Reference: The book follows the plot of David Copperfield, using the story to portray the lives of the poor in Appalachia, with emphasis on the opioid crisis.
• Wicked Stepfather: Stoner, an abusive asshole who hits Damon and treats David's mother like a slave.
• Would Hurt a Child: Stoner hits Damon hard enough at the breakfast table to knock him off the chair.