Demon Copperhead opens with his own birth in a Lee County, Virginia trailer: his eighteen-year-old mother is unconscious on the bathroom floor amid alcohol and pills, while he struggles out still inside the intact amniotic sac. Neighbor Nance Peggot forces her way in, calls for an ambulance, and later describes Demon as a “little blue prizefighter,” a first sign to him that he might have a fighting chance despite the odds.

Demon reflects on how people assume a child born to addiction is doomed, and he clings to the idea of rescues and superheroes even in a “trailer-home universe.” Nance Peggot also attaches folk belief to his “baggie birth”: God’s promise that he will never drown, a notion that lodges in Demon’s mind and feeds his lifelong fixation on water and the ocean—something he’s only seen in pictures and on a library computer screen saver.

He places his childhood landscape “dead in the heart of Lee County,” near Ruelynn coal camp and a settlement called Right Poor. Demon spends hours in the woods and creek with his neighbor boy Matt “Maggot” Peggot, playing at being Marvel heroes. Maggot lives with Nance because Maggot’s mother is in Goochland Women’s Prison, underscoring how many broken families surround Demon from the start.

Demon explains the local lore that their holler is “crawling with copperheads,” though he rarely sees the actual snake; he learns that people enjoy believing in danger when it belongs to someone else. He then reveals the deeper meaning of “Copperhead”: it’s the name of his dead father, a man his mother describes as Melungeon-looking with green eyes, red hair, and a snake-handling past marked by bites and a snake tattoo. Copperhead died the summer before Demon was born, and Demon grows up visibly marked by his father’s traits.

Demon contrasts Nance Peggot’s account with his mother’s unreliable version: his mother claims Copperhead’s mother, Betsy Woodall, appeared during labor to seize the baby and raise it among violent snake-handling Baptists in Tennessee. Demon doubts the story yet can’t escape its implications—his mother imagines a rescuer coming for a baby girl, not him, and she erases his father’s name from the tale, reducing him to “the bad choice.” Demon ends by noting his mother’s repeated rehabs, shaped by fear of losing custody and the cycle of “bad choices.”