Customer Reviews
Outcast becomes killer - By: Black Glove, 08 Nov 2008 
A bleak & realistic tale of how an outcast becomes a serial killer & a necrophilein the hills & woods of East Tennessee. This is tight, dark & poetic writing. Lester Ballard's descent into horrific perversion is told with precise & evocative language. Nothing fancy. No over-indulgence or gratuitous detail for shock-value's sake. Just a clear & strong depiction of Ballard's almost numb mindset & what-he-did mid the snows of one winter.
Cormac's Darkest Novel - By: Bruce Kendall, 30 Nov 2002 Cormac McCarthy is one of the most accessible of modern authors. Thisin no way diminishes his accomplishments, as he is adept at so many facets of the writer's art. His prose blends perfectly the spare & the lyrical. His pacing is flawless. The reader is swept up into his cadences, securein the knowledge that he/she will be expertly guided through the thickets & brambles to the clearing ahead, also assured that there would be no needless detours along the way. We are never overburdened with needless detail. Characters are believable & delineated concretely. The reader's senses are awakened to sensory impressions that are visceral. We "remember" what he describes.
is a great example of this master storyteller's art. It is a novel without any hint at artifice. It can be read by virtually anyone. What distinguishes it from equally "accessible" works is that it can be read on so many levels. In other words, it is a work that naturally has broad appeal. It will appeal to those who enjoy reading about disturbed murderers & psychopaths. On the other hand it will hold enormous interest to readers who are thoroughly familiar with the Southern Gothic fiction of William Faulkner & Flannery O'Connor. Not to denigrate McCarthy, but on the surface, this work might even be called "Faulkner Lite." McCarthy's acknowledgment to Faulknerin fact occursin the opening sentence of the novel (which also happens to be the work's longest sentence) < They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw & across the hillin the morning sun, the truck rocking & pitchingin the ruts & the musicians on chairsin the truckbed teetering & tuning their instruments, the fat man with the guitar grinning & gesturing to othersin a car behind & bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg & listened with a wrinkled face. > This alliterative run-on is clearly McCarthy's way of paying homage to the master. Like Faulkner & O'Connor, this novelist peoples his fiction with grotesque, or at the least, exaggerated characters. The Cornelius Suttree of the novel could just as easily be a member of the Sutpen familyin Faulkner. And the main characterin this work, Lester Ballad, is every bit as amoral & unconcerned with human life as is "The Misfit"in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." In fact, if one were looking for a literary model for Lester Ballad, one should turn to O'Connor before going to Hannibal Lecter. Ballard is a kind of amalgam of The Misfit & Harper Lee's Boo Radley, the "child of God" sequestered awayin . The difference being that whereas Boo Radley was only a scarecrow, Ballard is something far more sinister & malignant. Malignancy,in fact, is what this novel is about essentially. Lester Ballard is a tumor that has been growing & festering within the body of the community. He is a case of "out of sight, out of mind." Because he has been repeatedly shunted off by the insular southern town that McCarthy depicts, he is freein his isolation to let his psychotic mind's tendrils expand & propagate unchecked. McCarthy's underlying message may be that the more we neglect those on the periphery of society, the more we invite evil into our lives. The very title of the book seems to beg the question. It recallsin some respects Christ's warning/appeal that "as you do unto the least of these (God's children), so you do unto me." Soin a very large sense, Lester Ballard represents every street-person you passin San Francisco or New York or wherever you happen to be a member of a larger community. Ballard isin this sense more avenging angel than irredeemable villain. The malignancy is growingin our collective communities, for the most part unseen, but festering, nevertheless. The greater our neglect, the greater the chance for evil rebounding upon us.
If you have not read McCarthy, this is a great place to start. You can read this novelin one or two sittings, as it flows so smoothly & uninterruptedly that you will not even notice that he is planting these seeds of inquiry as you are rolling along. Yet after you put the book down, you will no doubt take away a lot more than you noticedin passing.
Even if you don' t like necrophiles, you'll love this book. - By: , 09 Oct 1998
Lester Ballard, the main characterin McCarthy's ominous Child of God, is not the most likable guy. He's an antisocial psychopath who lurks around the backwoods scaring & killing innocent people. We are drawn in, however, because despite his horrifying lifestyle we start to walkin his shoes. McCarthy's striking descriptions & perpetually foreboding tone lead us into a tangled world where loneliness leads to murderous extremes, & the woods become the playing ground for our demonical hero. At the end we feel unsettled: we like him.
