Product Description
In this taut, chilling novel, Lester Ballard--a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape--haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.
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Amazon.com Review
"Scuttling down the mountain with the thing on his back he looked like a man beset by some ghast succubus, the dead girl riding him with legs bowed akimbo like a monstrous frog." Child of God must be the most sympathetic portrayal of necrophilia in all of literature. The hero, Lester Ballard, is expelled from his human family and ends up living in underground caves, which he peoples with his trophies: giant stuffed animals won in carnival shooting galleries and the decomposing corpses of his victims. Cormac McCarthy's much-admired prose is suspenseful, rich with detail, and yet restrained, even delicate, in its images of Lester's activities. So tightly focused is the story on this one "child of God" that it resembles a myth, or parable. "You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you.... A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it."
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 Terrible...
A waste of beautiful prose and dialog. Disturbing for the sake of disturbing. Lacking any of the emotion that has made the disturbance in McCarthy's other novels lead to insight and in many cases, redemption.
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 depressing
If you are feeling good about anything do not read this book...but if you have had some hard times and like beautiful writing..go ahead.. The main character in this book is in such a terrible mess and always goes the wrong way..the book will make your life seem like a piece of cake. Not for youth , not for the shy and not for me.
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 Good, but not McCarthy's best ( jimmieb )
All of McCarthy's writing is at times disturbing, but this book is perhaps the most twisted of the six I have read. The main character is a Tennessee hermit, Lester Ballard, similar to though less refined than McCarthy's Cornelius Suttree. In the beginning of the book, Ballard is evicted from his land and takes up residence in an abandoned house in the woods, then later in a cave. He roams the woods like a specter, hunting rifle under his arm, scavenging for discarded items he can use in his home. During one of these wanderings, he comes across a dead man and woman in a parked car. He carries the woman's body back to his home and keep her for carnal purposes. CHILD OF GOD is probably the most unsettling book I've read since A.M. Homes' The End of Alice. Part of what makes the book so difficult to read is that McCarthy's writing, like Homes', is so strong. It legitimizes the depravity of the story in a way that other writers couldn't. The book never feels shocking for the sake of shock. And although there are no truly likable characters in the book, Ballard is certainly memorable. If there is a theme, it is that societies create their own own depravity when they cast out and neglect their citizens. As McCarthy says when he introduces us to Ballard, we are all born children of God.
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 McCarthy's tale of a Southern Ed Gein where Horror becomes Art ( mhk_77 )
I love horror of any kind; novels, short stories, movies, you name it. Being from Tennessee, I'm especially drawn to "rural legends" about backwoods boogie men that you often wonder are or aren't lurking somewhere off in the woods beyond your back doorstep.
My first McCarthy book was "Blood Meridian", which I devoured this past spring. I say devoured as it totally consumed my reading time but took some three weeks to finish. While reading novels, especially longer ones, I dabble in a short story or two along the way. That was not the case with "Blood Meridian", it consumes you and I found myself doing extra research about the locales and peoples it mentioned. At times, with the inclusion of Spanish and a variety of not-everyday-use words, it was a tough though very rewarding read and it's ending will chill you to the bone.
"Child of God" has all of the greatness that is McCarthy but it a much more digestible pill. The expertly crafted prose drip with poetics while communicating exactly what the reader needs to know to picture a scene. Many authors try this and all you're left with is watercolor gobbledygook. The blurb on the front cover says "demands its reader's attention from the opening sentence" and quite honestly there is no better one sentence summation.
The novel narrates the sordid and assorted episodes of Lester Ballard, a nare-do-well inhabiting East Tennessee's mountainous region. Some of the things Lester gets away with boggle the mind but you learn that there may be divine, or infernal, powers at work. Often, there is a dreamlike quality to many of the tales and in every case each character jumps to life in your very living room. There is humor, sometimes blackened, and there is small town life in a nutshell, and there is enough horror to make Edward Lee have convulsions.
I didn't do any research while reading this particular McCarthy novel but I wonder if this could be another story based on the exploits of Ed Gein, ala Pyscho and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Rest assured the details are not gratuitous, just enough so you get the picture. While I love the above mentioned films/book, what separates McCarthy from them is his lyrical prowess, his gift for words. John Gardner, in his book "The Art of Fiction", discusses the idea of elevating the popular. By this, he means taking something within popular culture and turning it into a work of art. To my mind, this is exactly what you have with McCarthy and "Child of God". He has taken a gruesome event in history, one that had already been exploited (for lack of a better term) before, and combined it with his lyrical prowess to create a highly literate work of utmost horror.
This is only the second McCarthy book I have read. I can safely say it and "Blood Meridian" are resting at the foremost position on my list of favorite books of all time. Have a read, and see if it doesn't merit a place on yours.
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Road Lovers, Start Here ( toddincharge )
If you found the minimal, bleak, tone-poem style and sometimes-horrific subject matter of The Road to your liking, then you can do no better than to turn to this early McCarthy tale, written in 1973.
Here the protagonist is some kind of freaky, Southern gothic nutjob, with a penchant for bizarre and/or murderous activities amid the locals. It's evident from the very first page that Cormac is a master storyteller with a highly unique style, although his roots do include Faulkner among others.
This is an excellent airplane book, short, portable, and something that can be finished on a single trip. But I wouldn't call it beach reading.
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