With his “pharm parties” and status as football aristocracy, Sterling is a seductive recasting of the poisonous “gentleman” by birth, James Steerforth. While there he befriends two other boys, an unadulteratedly Dickensian Tommy Waddles – complete with his prototype’s habit of sketching skeletons – and the charismatic, pill-popping school quarterback Sterling Ford, known as Fast Forward for his prowess on the field. Where David is packed off to gloomy Salem House, run by the sadistic Mr Creakle, Demon is quite literally farmed out to “this big old gray-looking house, like Amityville”, owned by a tobacco farmer called Crickson.
Demon becomes a casualty of the “monster-truck mud rally of child services”: case workers who don’t read his file foster parents who are only in it for the security cheque. If you’re familiar with David Copperfield, then the arc of Demon Copperhead will hold few surprises. It’s all there in Dickens: the weak, infantile mother, ripe for abuse the dead father and the disciplinarian boyfriend turned merciless stepfather the bad odds against which no child stands a chance – and also the outsiders, some loving and others less so, who offer only a limited form of help.ĭickens would have agreed wholeheartedly with Demon’s verdict that “a kid is a terrible thing to be, in charge of nothing”. Since his mother is in and out of rehab, Demon is partly raised by the sprawling, warm-hearted Peggot clan.
Even in this deprived neighbourhood they stand out by being almost destitute, living between a coal camp “and a settlement people call Right Poor”. Kingsolver’s hero Damon Fields, known as Demon and nicknamed Copperhead for his red hair, is born to a drug-using teenage single mother in a trailer in Lee County, Virginia.
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