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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Demon Copperhead, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Exploitation
Class, Social Hierarchy, and Stereotypes
Pain and Addiction
Toxic Masculinity
Community and Belonging
Summary
Analysis
The Farm Supply store has an end-of-summer sale each year. The store’s former manager, Vester Spencer, comes with his daughter, Dori, and Demon falls for her as soon as he sees her. After Demon and Dori chat for a minute, her dad has a coughing fit, and they leave. A few weeks later, Demon goes with Fast Forward to a drive-in movie and sees her again. Demon asks how her dad is, and she says he’ll never really be okay again after having a recent heart attack. When she asks about Demon’s parents, he wants to lie, but he doesn’t. He tells her they’ve both died. It turns out that Dori has had experiences with DSS, too, because the state wasn’t sure if her dad should raise a girl alone.
Demon and Dori become closer by sharing memories of similar traumatic experiences, which parallels how Demon and Emmy first bonded. That similarity suggests that, in some ways, Demon is looking to heal his trauma through his romantic interests. The novel draws the comparison, then, between the painkillers that are supposed to alleviate suffering and other means people turn to in order to alleviate suffering, like romantic relationships. Ultimately, the novel argues that the best way to heal trauma, though, is to address it directly rather than looking for temporary ways to treat symptoms like pain.
Themes
After Dori goes back to the group she came with, Demon runs into Tommy. He never got adopted, but he’s living in an apartment with roommates and has a girlfriend. When Demon goes back to Fast Forward’s truck, he’s with a woman who people call Car Wash. Rose then comes up and slams a paper bag on the truck’s tailgate. She says she had to drive all the way to Kentucky to get whatever’s in the bag. Fast Forward gets angry and calls her hideous to her face. She yells back that Sterling Ford (Fast Forward’s real name) is the worst mistake his mom ever made. She walks away, and Demon follows her to try to get change for Fast Forward.
Demon runs into Tommy while he is out with Fast Forward, a coincidence that points again toward Fast Forward letting Crickson beat Tommy for something he (Fast Forward) did. Immediately after, Fast Forward hurls insults at Rose when she returns from running an errand for Fast Forward. The evidence against Fast Forward seems to be mounting, but Demon still can’t change his opinion of him, and this reinforces Demon’s struggles to accurately judge a person’s character.
Themes
When Demon finds Rose, she tells him that Fast Forward doesn’t own the farm. Instead, he lives in what the owners call a guest house, which is really a barn, and feeds the horses. She explains that her family adopted Fast Forward when he was little after his mom died. They had to “unadopt” him when he was nine, though, because he kept trying to kill the other kids in the family. She says he gave her the scar on her face when he threw a hammer at her. Demon returns to Fast Forward and his friends. They drink the tequila Rose brought. Demon doesn’t remember the rest of the night, but he wakes up the next morning halfway up the stairs to his room. Angus helps him get to his room and tells him that he’s messing up.
Rose’s story portrays Fast Forward as charming, manipulative, and seemingly incapable of feeling empathy. Still, Demon returns to Fast Forward and his friends, drinking with them late into the night. In the morning, Angus points out to Demon that he has everything he wants—and is throwing it away. The novel suggests, then, that while Demon may have everything he’s looking for, he might not be ready for those things because he hasn’t addressed his own trauma yet.
Themes
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