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).