Child Of God - Cormac McCarthy

One of his early novels⎯his third to be published—Child Of God is not a book on the same scale as Cormac McCarthy’s later masterworks, such as Blood Meridian, but is nonetheless a gripping and stylistically unmatched character study from a man who seems always able to boil his narrative down to its barest essentials and, in doing so, reveal the hidden (and often horrible) depths of madness and depravity to which mankind, with its dark and troubled heart, so readily descends.

Set in the early 1960s in a backroads town in East Tennessee, Child Of God tells the haunting and deeply disturbing tale of one Lester Ballard, an impoverished outcast whose unfathomable lusts escalate into unspeakable acts of violence and degradation. In a lesser writer’s hands the story and its many frightening events could have easily turned to exaggerated horror-pulp, but McCarthy is (and apparently always was) rather adept at handling this kind of lost soul, imbuing Ballard with a vulnerability that, while never allowing for sympathy, still manages him some level of humanity despite his growing list of terrible deeds.

His prose is, as ever, brilliant: spare and minimal, evoking only the barest details required by the story but feeling somehow more detailed for it. His depictions of nature, which are many, I find especially beautiful. Here’s an example:

The hardwood trees on the mountain subsided into yellow and flame and to ultimate nakedness. An early winter fell, a cold wind sucked among the black and barren branches. Alone in the empty shell of a house the squatter watched through moteblown glass a rimshard of bonecoloured moon come cradling up over the black balsams on the ridge, ink trees a facile hand had sketched against the paler dark of winter heavens.

Pretty gnarly, eh?

It should be noted for fans of The Road, that while that book is bleak and depressing and clearly the work of the same writer, it is not indicative of his more consistent style or themes. I’m not saying that to scare people off, as I do hope that more people start reading McCarthy (which seems likely since so many of his books are currently being made into films). I just thought it was worth pointing out.

Enjoy.