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Demon Copperhead
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Chapters 1-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: The following section contains summaries and analyses of drug addiction, death by overdose, physical and emotional abuse, sexual exploitation, and anti-gay slurs.
Demon Copperhead is born on a Wednesday. His mother passes out during the birth in her bathroom, and Nance Peggot walks in just in time to help Demon out of his amniotic sac.
Demon grows up fantasizing about the ocean, which he has never seen and believes to be “the one big thing [that] is not going to swallow [him] alive” (3). He plays with his best friend Maggot, which is the nickname of Matt, Nance’s grandson. Maggot lives with Nance because his mother is in prison. The boys play in the woods of southwestern Virginia, which townspeople claim is full of copperhead snakes. Demon’s father, whom his mother met in one of her stints in rehab and who died before Demon was born, was called “Copperhead.” Demon knows that his father died in a place called the Devil’s Bathtub, though he doesn’t know the details.
Though his mother is unconscious for Demon’s birth, she claims that Copperhead’s mother visited her in the hours before her labor. Copperhead’s family was supposedly made up of “individuals that beat the tar out of each other, husbands belting wives, mothers beating kids with whatever object fell to hand” (4). When the labor pains started, Demon’s mom drank alcohol and took Vicodin to dull the pain, and Copperhead’s mother wanted to take the baby. Demon often wonders about his dead father.
Chapter 2 Summary
As a child, Demon feels powerless and confused. The world around him is full of oddities. His neighbors, Maggot’s grandparents, have a nest of birdhouses with no birds and a doghouse but no dog. He is thankful for the Peggots, who teach him how to hunt and take care of him when his mother can’t. Demon also likes church because of the singing and the idea that Jesus loves unconditionally, unlike real people. Demon envies Maggot his large and loving family. He even calls Mrs. Peggot “Mammaw.” Mrs. Peggot is the only person who calls Demon by his real name, Damon. In Lee County, it’s common for people to go by their nicknames.
Chapter 3 Summary
Murrell Stone is Demon’s mom’s new boyfriend, but he goes by his nickname Stoner. Demon’s mom struggles because she’s young and impoverished but has adult responsibilities; she tries to stay sober, but her boyfriends often derail her efforts. Demon and his mother smoke cigarettes together while she tells him about Stoner, who likes sober women. When Stoner invites Demon to ride on the back of his motorcycle, Mrs. Peggot warns Demon that he’ll die falling off the bike and Stoner will simply leave his body behind.
The Peggots bring Demon on a trip to visit their daughter, June, in Knoxville. Though Demon is nervous to leave his mother alone because he helps take care of her, she seems excited to let him go. However, when he does get ready to leave, his mother is unexpectedly emotional, asking him not to forget her and reminding him to be good.
Chapter 4 Summary
Humvee, one of Maggot’s uncles, is dead, but his daughter Emmy lives with her aunt, June. Aunt June is a rarity in Demon’s experience: a stable adult. She has an apartment with an extra bedroom and two bathrooms, as well as a car with functioning seatbelts. Emmy is a sixth grader with attitude. Demon likes her but doesn’t like the city—his first experience of tall buildings, no yards, and numerous neighbors. Demon is bored by city life and finds it lonely. Aunt June’s gory stories from her job in the emergency room are Demon and Maggot’s primary entertainment.
When Aunt June comes home late from work, Demon secretly watches her try to relax while she deals with the stress of trying to repair her family. When she’s not working, she takes the kids to different amusements around the city. Demon’s favorite outing is to the aquarium. The water and the sea creatures astound him. He helps Emmy conquer her fear of sharks by holding her hand in the shark exhibit. He uses his gift shop money to buy a bracelet for her. She tells him that one day, they will get married.
When they return home to Lee County, Demon’s mom surprises him with the news that she has married Stoner.
Chapter 5 Summary
While he was gone, Demon’s mom moved Demon to the smaller bedroom. Stoner moves into the home, bringing his dog, Satan, whom he trains to be aggressive. Stoner and Demon’s mom fight a lot; Stoner doesn’t want her to go to her AA and NA meetings because a lot of men attend them. Demon’s mom insists that Stoner will make their lives better because he has a stable job as a beer deliveryman.
Stoner tells Demon that he’s going to make sure Demon starts behaving properly. He claims that because Demon’s mom grew up in foster care, she never learned how to be a mother and is raising a “loser.” He hits Demon in the jaw. Demon tells Mrs. Peggot about Stoner hitting him, and she tells his mom. His mom tries to stand up for him, but Stoner accuses her of allowing the Peggots to raise her son and letting Demon play with Maggot, whom Stoner calls a “faggot.” Demon’s mom agrees to forbid Demon from visiting the Peggots. Demon is kept in the house, watching TV when Stoner isn’t around and reading comics alone in his room when Stoner is: “At some point the shows, comic books, drawings, and my dreams all got mashed up so it was like there wasn’t any me anymore. Just a quiet boy that looked like me with a beast inside, waiting to burst in a gamma warrior rage explosion” (35).
Demon notes that by ninth grade, Maggot would start stealing eyeliner and nail polish; he knows that as a boy, he can’t buy those things in a store. Everyone sees Maggot as a gay kid, but Demon sees him as the same Maggot he has always been. When Demon starts thinking of Maggot as a “faggot” too, he resents Stoner for putting the idea in his head.
Chapter 6 Summary
As a child, neither Maggot nor Demon knows the full story of why Maggot’s mother went to prison. Mariah Peggot got involved with the wrong guy, Romeo Blevin. Romeo was much better looking than Mariah, which he held over her head. When she got pregnant and moved in, he continued to go out with other girls. After she gave birth, she insisted that he stop seeing other women. Romeo tied her up to his deck and pointed his gun in her mouth. He drove off, leaving her tied to the deck, where she could watch her baby crying for her from inside the house.
The second time Romeo tied her up outside, it was for the entire night. Finally, she had had enough. Mariah took a knife and carved shapes into Romeo’s body. She didn’t want to kill him but wanted to prove that he couldn’t abuse her, especially at the expense of their son. Romeo took her to court, where everyone believed his story that she was obsessed with him and that Matty wasn’t even his child. Mariah was only 18 years old and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Chapter 7 Summary
The narrative returns to Demon at 10 years old. He’s happy to go to school because he can see Maggot there. When Demon returns from his first day, Stoner gets mad at him for wearing his muddy shoes in the house. He makes Demon clean and reclean the kitchen floor while his mom watches nervously. Then Stoner makes Demon clean the living room and derides Demon for being lazy. Demon fights back, but Stoner pins him down and locks him in his room. Demon knows he can’t rely on his mom. He fantasizes about running away—possibly going to Emmy in Kentucky.
Stoner punishes Demon by keeping him home from school but eventually allows him to return to avoid any investigations. Demon often hears his mom fighting with Stoner. One day, Stoner comes into his room and tells Demon that his mom wants to “show how much she love[s] [Demon]” (49). Panicked, Demon searches for her. He finds an open bottle of gin and then his mother, passed out from drugs. Demon’s mom has relapsed.
Chapter 8 Summary
As Demon calls for an ambulance, Stoner tries to wrestle the phone from him. Hearing the commotion, Mr. Peggot shows up. They all drive to the hospital. As they wait for news about his mom, a social worker approaches Demon. She asks him if the Peggots have molested him, but Demon changes the subject to Stoner. He tells the social worker about their fights, and the social worker takes pictures of the bruises on his body. Demon says that he’d like to shoot Stoner in the kneecaps so that he would beg for mercy. The social worker decides that Demon can’t go back home alone with Stoner; however, due to an accusation Stoner made against the Peggots, Demon can’t go with them either. He suggests Aunt June in Knoxville, but he is not allowed to leave the state.
Demon spends the night in the hospital. The next morning, his official caseworker, Miss Barks, meets with him. Demon notes that Miss Barks is attractive, but he wonders what she means when she tells him she’ll bring him home. Miss Barks and the social worker from the previous night drive Demon to a farm. They explain that there is a high demand for foster families, so it took them a while to find a place for Demon to stay. A man named Crickson is taking him in, and he can still attend his school. Demon’s mom will be released from the hospital into a long-treatment rehabilitation center; when she leaves that facility, she will have to undergo supervision before she can regain custody of Demon. They pull up to a large house that reminds Demon of the house in Amityville.
Chapter 9 Summary
Crickson’s wife has passed away, and he has other boys from the foster care system already living with him. The house is large but dirty, and even Miss Barks seems uncomfortable talking to Crickson; she tells him his check will arrive in the mail and then leaves. Crickson reminds Demon of Freddy Kreuger. Crickson remarks that it’s a surprise no one has filed Demon’s teeth since his file says he’s a biter. Crickson shows Demon his cattle and teaches him to put up fences with a staple gun. He then feeds Demon a big lunch. The other foster boys–Tommy and Swap-Out—come home from school. Demon recognizes Swap-Out from school; he is quite small and has been held back in school, likely due to his mother drinking while pregnant.
Tommy tells Demon that whenever the farm’s tax bill is due, Crickson takes in another boy from foster care to get money. Tommy has been living with Crickson on and off for two years but believes that Crickson hates him. Tommy seems nice and is excited for Demon to meet the oldest boy in the house, a high school football star named Fast Forward. At dinner, Demon is impressed that even Crickson seems to look up to Fast Forward.
That night, Fast Forward gathers the boys for “collection.” Swap-Out gives him the lunch money he didn’t use, and Demon is surprised to find $10 in his pocket, which he hands over. Fast Forward calls their group the “Hillbilly Squadron.”
Chapter 10 Summary
Tommy is an orphan who has been in foster care his entire life. His foster homes have gotten worse as he has grown older because people prefer babies. Tommy is overweight, which even Crickson teases him about. Whenever Tommy’s feelings are hurt, he draws skeletons. Demon also likes to draw.
It takes the boys a long time to get from Crickson’s house to school. They have to take the high school bus and then transfer to their middle and elementary school buses. Demon overhears a lot of discussion of sex on the high school bus.
At school, Demon reunites with Maggot, who sneaks into Demon’s house to pack pillowcases of his things when Stoner isn’t around.
Fast Forward uses the money he collects from the other boys to buy them candy and snacks for a little party. Demon feels funny and realizes that the cookies Fast Forward gave them contained marijuana. Fast Forward also gives the boys pills, which make Demon feel good. Looking back on this moment, Demon realizes that people might judge getting a 10-year-old high, but he also recognizes the Fast Forward was doing his best to make the younger boys feel safe in an unsafe situation: “Because all the adults had gone off somewhere and left everything in our hands” (77).
Chapters 1-10 Analysis
The novel’s character and setting development begin with the story of Demon’s birth, which encapsulates the problems with his mother that will plague him. Mrs. Peggot comes to newborn Demon’s assistance, which is the start of a long-term pattern of the Peggot family helping Demon through his most unstable life moments. Kingsolver includes the symbol of Demon’s amniotic sac to represent his tough exterior; he has a thick skin, almost literally. The amniotic sac is a symbolic biological reaction from Demon’s body; because of The Failure of Society to Protect Its Children, Demon must protect himself from the world’s dangers, including those his mother presents. This amniotic sac becomes a legend in Demon’s narrative as an explanation for his fascination with the ocean, a place he’s never seen before, is tied to this birthright through the thickened and intact amniotic sac; the idea that water alone cannot kill Demon lays the groundwork for the ending of the novel, where the sight of the ocean symbolizes hope for Demon’s future. Through the amniotic sac, Kingsolver draws the first direct parallel to Dickens’s David Copperfield, which also begins with the birth of David in a caul. Much like Demon’s, David Copperfield’s caul is considered good fortune.
Nicknames are as important in Demon Copperhead as they are in David Copperfield. In Demon Copperhead, nicknames take on identities of their own and demonstrate the mythical quality stories can acquire. What’s more, the prevalence of nicknames emphasizes the small community of Demon’s rural Appalachian town; everyone knows everyone else’s nickname and the personal stories that gave rise to them. Stoner’s nickname reflects his stone-like exterior and emotional ignorance. Maggot’s nickname reflects his looks and later in his life becomes an easy name to twist into an anti-gay slur. Demon’s nickname is a play on his given name (Damon), but it fits the reputation he acquires for biting others when he’s in a precarious situation. This defense mechanism is also appropriate to the name “Copperhead”—not just his father’s nickname but a dangerous snake. Demon never finds these snakes in the woods, despite everyone’s warnings that the forest teems with them, highlighting the absence of his father and Demon’s metaphorical search for him.
Mrs. Peggot, the neighbor who acts as a true mother to Demon, parallels the character of Mrs. Peggotty in David Copperfield, a faithful housekeeper who takes David under her wing. In both novels, Mrs. Peggot/Peggotty brings the protagonist on a family trip that is a formative experience in his life. Both Demon and David learn that families can be tight-knit, supportive, kind, and fun—very different from their own home situations. Importantly, Mrs. Peggot is a good woman but doesn’t live a perfect life; her daughter, for instance, is incarcerated. Through the Peggots, Kingsolver demonstrates that no family is perfect, but that a family built on genuine love and protection can raise good young people. Kingsolver also introduces the character of Emmy, a precocious little girl who grows close with Demon. Emmy is the parallel of Little Em’ly in David Copperfield. Dickens’s novel deals with the downfall and destruction of Little Em’ly’s life and reputation at the hands of selfish men. Kingsolver thus foreshadows that Emmy’s life will be difficult, and Demon will be a spectator in her downfall.
Both Demon and David’s lives change while they’re away in ways they can’t anticipate or control. They return from their idyllic family trips to find their own families in disarray thanks to the new, evil stepfathers in their lives. Stoner, Demon’s mother’s new husband, is the literary parallel of Edward Murdstone in David Copperfield. Like Murdstone, Stoner is cruel to Demon and abuses both Demon and Demon’s mother. As the first man Demon must stand up against, Stoner is fundamentally important to Demon’s character development. He is also the person who drives Demon’s mother back to drugs, breaking her sobriety.
Just as in David Copperfield, Demon is sent to a new place to live when things don’t work out with Stoner. Mr. Crickson is the parallel to Dickens’s Mr. Creakle, a headmaster known for his abuse. Mr. Crickson is thus far a fine caretaker for Demon. He feeds Demon well and doesn’t hurt him, but his cruelty to Tommy suggests that Crickson is not a good person. What’s more, he takes in boys for the money he receives from the government and the extra farm labor that children from the foster system provide, implying that Crickson is not a natural parent and has a transactional and therefore dangerous relationship with his children. Demon’s new friend Tommy is a welcome relief in a tense time. Like Maggot, Tommy is kind and provides Demon with authentic and deep friendship. Also like Maggot, Tommy’s physicality is the subject of mean-spirited jokes. Through the humiliations of Tommy and Maggot, Kingsolver suggests that life is cruelest to those who are kind, highlighting the inherent injustice of living in a broken society in which bad people seek to destroy good people.
In David Copperfield, a schoolboy under Mr. Creakle’s tutelage named James Steerforth impresses David with his natural leadership and savoir-faire. In Demon Copperhead, Mr. Crickson’s oldest and longest-term foster son, Fast Forward, is legendary to the younger boys. Like Steerforth, he is charming but cunning, popular but with a twist of hidden evil. In David Copperfield, David admires Steerforth despite his obvious flaws. In Dickens’s novel, Steerforth eventually meets Little Em’ly and convinces her to run away with him, destroying her reputation as a young woman. The clear parallel between Steerforth and Fast Forward (both their names imply moving quickly ahead, implying their leadership but also their recklessness) suggests that Fast Forward may disappoint Demon by taking advantage of Emmy.
By drawing on David Copperfield, Kingsolver adapts Dickens’s famous purpose of using literature to teach his countrymen about the downtrodden. Dickens is known for themes dealing with poverty and reform, and he often uses young people as protagonists to emphasize an innocence hurt by a villainous society. Kingsolver’s novel seeks to do the same, but for a 21st-century American audience. Kingsolver seeks to observe, criticize, and empathize with poverty in modern American rural communities, highlighting issues such as the foster care system and drug addiction and suggesting The Exploitation of the Rural Working Class.
Demon’s life is full of people living at various levels of poverty. No character is free from some trouble connected to poverty—even those like Aunt Jane, who are financially stable. Aunt June might have used her work ethic and mind to get out of her destructive hometown, but her fostering of Emmy demonstrates that she is still tied to the poverty-related problems of her large family. Family support can battle the ills of poverty, but family can also beget more poverty. For example, both Maggot and Demon’s mothers see their lives essentially ruined by becoming teenage mothers. Incapable of caring for their children because they haven’t learned how to take care of themselves, they try to be good mothers but fail in the face of the cycle of poverty. Abuse and trauma are inherited in this novel, and pain is generational. Maggot is lucky to have his grandparents to take care of him, but the stigma of his mother’s incarceration is a blight on his entire family. Stoner uses Demon’s mother’s inability to provide a stable life for Demon as fodder for taunting her and emotionally abusing her. Stoner uses Demon’s family’s poverty as a way of asserting his own power, but Stoner is not much better off. His job is stable but does not suggest much upward mobility.
The broken foster care system also illustrates the cyclical nature of poverty. Fast Forward gives the younger boys drugs, setting them up for the same lifetime addiction their parents have struggled with. While it’s easy to be shocked at Fast Forward, Demon believes that Fast Forward was only trying to make the little boys feel safe in an unsafe situation. Drugs do calm Demon, giving him feelings of warmth and pleasure when his life is falling apart, and Fast Forward certainly learned to use drugs to dull his pain from someone else. Thus, Kingsolver asks the reader to extend empathy to young boys like Fast Forward, who have not been taught other ways of dealing with the pain of abandonment, poverty, and abuse. Demon’s community has an epidemic of children in the foster care system, highlighting the ways in which poverty leads to drug use, which can lead to the abandonment of children. There are few foster families and too many children needing care, implying a cyclical and never-ending problem
The emotional effects of poverty are evident in Demon’s ironic tone. Though he narrates in retrospect, it is clear that even at 10 years old, he was already weary of life and of people. Kingsolver uses Demon’s first-person narrative point of view to articulate an abused child’s fortitude and anger. Demon’s narrative voice alludes to future events, suggesting that he is telling his story from a future vantage point. The use of the past tense and Demon’s occasional editorial points suggest that he is telling his story as a memoir; as an adult, he can look back on his difficult childhood with empathy and clarity, which hints at the character development that will take place in the novel. David Copperfield also uses the first-person narrative voice in this way, and many scholars believe that David Copperfield is Dickens’s fictionalized autobiography, or a piece of autofiction.
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