Damon Fields, nicknamed Demon Copperhead for his caul birth and copper hair, arrives in a Lee County trailer while his teenage mother is high. Neighbor Nance Peggot (“Mrs. Peggot”) forces her way in and saves them both, becoming the first of several protectors who will try to keep Demon alive. His father—beautiful, reckless, and tied to snake-handling lore—dies before Demon is born, leaving a hole that fills with rumors and questions about lineage and fate. The Peggots offer steadiness: creek days with grandson Maggot, church, hunting lessons, and a sense of belonging Demon can’t find at home.

Murrell “Stoner” Stone strides into their lives with a Harley and benefits, wooing Demon’s newly sober mother. Marriage brings a vicious dog, isolation from the Peggots, and Stoner’s sadistic “discipline.” When Demon resists a toxic, degrading punishment, Stoner locks him in his room. The breaking point comes when Demon finds his mother passed out with pills and alcohol; he orders Stoner to call 911, triggering DSS intervention. Because Stoner has planted complaints, Demon can’t go to the Peggots. He’s placed at Creaky Farm with Mr. Crickson, a filthy operation where foster boys work cattle and tobacco while star athlete Sterling “Fast Forward” Ford controls the pecking order and introduces Demon—age ten—to pills.

At Creaky’s, kind Tommy Waddell teaches Demon the ropes; developmentally delayed Swap-Out cowers under Fast Forward’s nightly “drill.” Demon labors in tobacco, collapses from nicotine poisoning, and clings to supervised visits with his mother, who announces a new pregnancy and promises sobriety. On his eleventh birthday, a school caseworker delivers the truth: his mother has died of oxy. Stoner stages the funeral and buries her with his kin; Demon, guided by Mrs. Peggot, absorbs the losses of both mother and unborn baby and watches even the pencil marks that measured his childhood wiped away.

Foster shuffles follow. At the McCobbs, food is scarce, a baby monitor spies on him, and he’s pushed into off-the-books work behind Golly’s Market under “Ghost,” a tattooed friend of Stoner whose back room reeks of meth precursors. A kind store owner, Mr. Golly, feeds Demon stories and sandwiches while the caseworker who once cared for him, Miss Barks, leaves DSS. With winter looming and the McCobbs planning a move, Demon lies his way into a trip and hitchhikes to Murder Valley, where his paternal grandmother Betsy Woodall—hard as hickory and devoted to the girls she has raised—recognizes his face as her son’s. Betsy feeds, bathes, and clothes him, then sets terms: she won’t surrender him to the state, but she won’t raise a boy. With help from her gentle, bookish brother Mr. Dick, she arranges a trial placement back in Virginia with Coach Winfield, a high school legend.

At Coach’s hilltop mansion, Demon meets Angus, Coach’s androgynous-presenting child who becomes his fiercest ally. Housekeeper Mattie Kate brings order and hot meals; Demon starts over at Jonesville Middle, outfitted by Angus and protected by Coach’s celebrity. Two teachers change his life: Mr. Armstrong, who treats kids with candor and history, and Ms. Annie, an art teacher who puts real tools in Demon’s hands. On Saturdays Demon hauls laundry at varsity practice and watches Coach transform into a surgeon of the game. By summer, Coach maps a future for Demon at tight end and keeps him in the house.

Demon wins friends, discovers he tests as Gifted, and starts to believe in a future that isn’t a fluke. U-Haul Pyles—a creepy booster who inflates his title—stalks him with veiled threats. At the Peggots’, a visiting pharma rep named Kent pitches long-acting pain pills while Aunt June, now a nurse practitioner, praises access and unbelievingly dismisses addiction risk—a seed that will sprout into tragedy. Demon lifts, studies, draws, and enters high school as a passing-game spark. Cruising town one summer, he reconnects with Fast Forward, now a small farmer with big talk and weed in the console. On the Fourth of July at June’s, Demon spots Mouse, a brash Philly dealer selling little black disks; he also sees Emmy Peggot with a new ring from Hammer Kelly and feels shame at outsiders’ contempt for his people.

Then love and ruin arrive together. Demon falls for Dori Spencer, the feed-store owner’s daughter who is caring for her sick father. During a key game, Demon blows out his knee. The team doctor overprescribes Lortab, Percocet, and then Oxy; June warns against narcotics, but the pills ease a pain intensified by identity panic. At homecoming, with bottles rattling in his bag, Demon and Dori are crowned; afterward she produces a fentanyl patch, injects herself, doses him, and they sleep together. His star dims as dependency takes root. Mr. Peg dies, leaving the Peggot household broken. Demon tries to taper for next season, hides at Dori’s, then conscripts Fast Forward for a beach trip that detours to Mouse’s Richmond drug house; a cocaine night and a secret hidden-box retrofit end the ocean dream.

Dori’s father dies in an ice storm; within weeks Demon moves in with her. Selling surplus prescriptions in a pill-mill parking lot run by the same doctor who wrote Demon’s scripts, they slide into survival mode. Ms. Annie and Mr. Armstrong pull Demon into a different future: the local newspaper runs his anonymous strip, Red Neck, and Ms. Annie negotiates a real contract. Even that hope carries a punch—Rose Dartell says Fast Forward has taken Emmy to Atlanta and used her to bait deals. June enlists Demon and her brother Everett to retrieve Emmy; they find a new-construction stash house, two small kids on cardboard, and Emmy half dressed and unconscious. Demon carries her out. On the ride home, June urges a Suboxone clinic and a halfway house in Knoxville when he’s ready.

Back with Dori, the pregnancy they briefly believe in ends in blood and fear. June sends Emmy to long-term rehab in Asheville. Angus, uncovering U-Haul’s years of forged checks and booster embezzlement, fights off his crude sexual blackmail while Coach lies passed out; Demon helps her secure keys and a firearm before U-Haul slips away. Days later Demon returns to find Dori dead of an overdose. He manages the cleanup and the spare, painful funeral as Aunt Fred empties the house into trash bags. Homeless, he crashes at Mrs. Peggot’s and binges with Maggot until a storm day propels them into a disastrous confrontation at Devil’s Bathtub: Fast Forward, showboating on a cliff, startles at Big Bear’s warning and falls to his death; Hammer dives into the torrent to save him and drowns. Demon hides the rifle and preserves Hammer’s face for his family.

Grief converges with blame. Rose calls Demon a murderer and threatens to implicate Maggot for supplying meth. June moves to contain legal risk and offers Demon a way out: Medicaid, Suboxone, rehab, and a Knoxville sober house. Demon drives west, hikes toward Sand Cave with no plan, and survives a night that could have gone another way. At dawn he chooses life and tells June he’s ready.

Recovery is unglamorous: Walmart produce by day, the library by night, and roommates—Viking and Gizmo from Kentucky, and Chartrain, a Knoxville wheelchair-basketball star—who teach him to “save his juice” for what matters. He earns a GED path with librarian Lyra’s help and launches new comics online; with Tommy, now in Allentown, he develops a graphic history about land people versus money powers. A publisher bites. Cautiously, Demon returns to Lee County. He finds calm at Devil’s Bathtub in winter light, shares breakfast and updates with June, and visits Miss Betsy and Mr. Dick. Coach, now sober in a small apartment, accepts coffee with a former player he nearly lost. At the old mansion, Demon and Angus move past old misreads and toward something new. She’s training in social work and staying local; he’s afraid of being obliterated by coming home. Angus hands him the gift he’s chased since birth—a spontaneous winter drive to the Atlantic. They leave together through falling snow, two survivors choosing a horizon wide enough to hold them.