The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
“He sees the world as it is and he looks back thousands of years to see how it all come about. He watches the slow agglutination of capital and power and he sees its pinnacle today. He sees America as a crazy house. He sees how men have to rob their brothers in order to live. He sees children starving and women working sixty hours a week to get to eat. He sees a whole damn army of unemployed and billions of dollars and thousands of miles of land wasted. He sees war coming. He sees how when people suffer just so much they get mean and ugly and something dies in them. But the main thing he sees is that the whole system of the world is built on a lie. And although it’s as plain as the shining sun -- the don’t-knows have lived with that lie so long they just can’t see it.”
The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
I want to start by saying that this novel is brutal and definitely not for sensitive readers. *I will include some trigger warnings below if you are undecided about reading.* Many violent scenes are depicted within the novel as readers follow a sordid bunch of perverse characters. None are, by any means, likable, but while some act out of pure evil, others are motivated by desperation or loneliness. Arvin’s father Willard being one of them, as he creates a sacrificial prayer log in a desperate attempt to save his dying wife, Charlotte. An introduction of veteran Willard and his haunting memory of World War II becomes the foundation for malicious and foul intent, which creates a ripple of violence throughout the story. The “hero” of the novel is the son of Willard, Arvin, who adopts violent tendencies to survive his rural settings and the wicked people he encounters.