Product Description

By the author of the critically acclaimed Border Trilogy, Child of God is a taut, chilling novel that plumbs the depths of human degradation. Lester Ballard, a violent, solitary and introverted young backwoodsman dispossessed on his ancestral land, is released from jail and allowed to haunt the hill country of East Tennessee, preying on the population with his strange lusts. McCarthy transforms commonplace brushes with humanity - in homesteads, stores and in the woods - into stunning scenes of the comic and the grotesque, and as the story hurtles toward its unforgettable conclusion, depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humour, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.

‘Demands its reader’s attention from the opening sentence’ Newsweek

‘A reading experience so impressive, so ‘new’, so clearly well made that it seems almost to defy the easy aesthetic categories . . . Accomplished in rare, spare, precise yet poetic prose’ New Republic

'His prose, unfailingly beautiful and exact, carries us into a dreamworld of astonishing and violent revelation. It is a frightening, entrancing world, which we must finally recognize as our own' Tobias Wolff

'McCarthy is a powerful and talented writer, able to elicit compassion for his protagonist however terrible his action' Sunday Times

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #181202 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

About the Author

Cormac McCarthy is the author of ten acclaimed novels, most recently The Road. Among his honours are the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Customer Reviews

Even if you don' t like necrophiles, you'll love this book.
Lester Ballard, the main character in McCarthy's ominous Child of God, is not the most likable guy. He's an antisocial psychopath who lurks around the backwoods scaring and killing innocent people. We are drawn in, however, because despite his horrifying lifestyle we start to walk in his shoes. McCarthy's striking descriptions and perpetually foreboding tone lead us into a tangled world where loneliness leads to murderous extremes, and the woods become the playing ground for our demonical hero. At the end we feel unsettled: we like him.

Outcast becomes killer
A bleak and realistic tale of how an outcast becomes a serial killer and a necrophile in the hills and woods of East Tennessee. This is tight, dark and poetic writing. Lester Ballard's descent into horrific perversion is told with precise and evocative language. Nothing fancy. No over-indulgence or gratuitous detail for shock-value's sake. Just a clear and strong depiction of Ballard's almost numb mindset and what-he-did mid the snows of one winter.

Cormac's Darkest Novel
Cormac McCarthy is one of the most accessible of modern authors. This in no way diminishes his accomplishments, as he is adept at so many facets of the writer's art. His prose blends perfectly the spare and the lyrical. His pacing is flawless. The reader is swept up into his cadences, secure in the knowledge that he/she will be expertly guided through the thickets and 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 and 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 and psychopaths. On the other hand it will hold enormous interest to readers who are thoroughly familiar with the Southern Gothic fiction of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. Not to denigrate McCarthy, but on the surface, this work might even be called "Faulkner Lite." McCarthy's acknowledgment to Faulkner in fact occurs in 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 and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with the guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face. > This alliterative run-on is clearly McCarthy's way of paying homage to the master.

Like Faulkner and 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 family in Faulkner. And the main character in this work, Lester Ballad, is every bit as amoral and 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 and Harper Lee's Boo Radley, the "child of God" sequestered away in . The difference being that whereas Boo Radley was only a scarecrow, Ballard is something far more sinister and malignant.

Malignancy, in fact, is what this novel is about essentially. Lester Ballard is a tumor that has been growing and 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 free in his isolation to let his psychotic mind's tendrils expand and 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 recalls in some respects Christ's warning/appeal that "as you do unto the least of these (God's children), so you do unto me." So in a very large sense, Lester Ballard represents every street-person you pass in San Francisco or New York or wherever you happen to be a member of a larger community. Ballard is in this sense more avenging angel than irredeemable villain. The malignancy is growing in 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 novel in one or two sittings, as it flows so smoothly and 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 noticed in passing.