Outer Dark

Though short in length, Outer Dark is a deep and lengthy exposition on the antiquated and rural American experience. McCarthy skillfully frays and interweaves a set of storylines occurring around the turn of the 20th century, though since it takes place in an isolated and unnamed countryside, it may as well be placed in the 19th century.

The story is based around the familial dissolution between Culla Holme and his sister Rinthy. Living together in rural isolation and upon the birth of her child, her brother promptly discards her child in the wilderness and sets out on an aimless sojourn for sustenance and perhaps a new set of boots; while awakened with the loss of her family, Rinthy resolves to set out and reclaim her child. Interspersed between each character's quest is the inclusion of a band of marauding malevolence influencing the travels of each.

Progressing through the Cormac McCarthy oeuvre, I've come to notice certain undeniable recurrences: aimless and intentionally underdeveloped characters, no quotation marks, sparse yet colorful dialogue, dusty and nearly-deserted roads serving as the vehicle of the story, and a healthy dose of depravity. None remains lacking here.

I contend that McCarthy is just as much a writer of horror as he is of high literature in the Faulknerian tradition asserted by so many others. Outer Dark is not just a story about incest or poverty, but rather like Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men, it's about the pervasive lack of morality or injustice and the whimsical brutality so inherent to humankind. It's about cannibalism, both metaphorical and literal; it's about the people who are "takers", those who are able to possess or consume others; and in McCarthy's world, the consequences are never assumed for anyone's actions.

Outer Dark is much starker than McCarthy's The Road, as it establishes a post-apocalyptic environment without the fireworks or even hint of a catastrophic event. Quite simply, it isn't needed. In that respect, it's much more powerful and disturbing; its conclusion is the antithesis to that in The Road.

Synopsis: sometime around 1900 Culla Holme impregnates his sister in a rural eastern Tennessee shack. He abandons the newborn in the woods, to be found by a wandering tinker. Culla's sister Rinthy goes in search of the baby as Culla flees, and both contend with their sad and solitary odysseys.

Like all of McCarthy's tales, this is one of simple people, unremarkable, salt-of-the-earth people with no education or sophistication, who endure ugly and complex situations (of their own making) which invariably lead to conflict and tragedy. Culla and Rinthy are humble and polite, straight-talking country folk who find themselves--so cleverly McCarthy opens past the seminal event and its circumstances (which in itself raises a major question with this reader)--caught up in horrible, life-defining circumstances.

This is an early McCarthy novel, his second, and as such you can see a lot of the seeds of future work. It has the wonder of nature and the loving, attentive description of nature's that so magnificently permeated Suttree, juxtaposed with the actions of soulless butchers (Blood Meridian). It has the dark and seemingly unstoppable human force of violence and death we saw in No Country for Old Men. And the unflinching barbarity we saw in The Road.

I can't get past how this book seems to be an exploration of guilt, with a little bit of karma thrown in. Culla asks himself early, in his own dream, "Can I be cured?" He carries and dutifully keeps his horrible secrets, yet everywhere he goes he encounters suspicion and accusation; it seems to radiate from him. Rinthy, essentially a victim, calm and obliging, finds compassion and care as she travels her sad road. By the end of the tale, both of them are reminded excruciatingly where the road leads, for all of us.

Culla is a man who can do no right, no matter his contrition or his honest willingness to earn his way. People intuitively sense his guilt; their sense is right, although they don't know him nor have any evidence. This is why the bearded man and his two companions get away with their actions; there are no regrets or qualms or thoughts to betray them.

It seems this also may be a swipe at karma/fate, how those get what is coming to them. A man asks, "...I believe they's purpose to everything. Don't you believe thataway?" Is he asking Culla or is McCarthy asking us? But, karma and fate operate only for those who have the capacity to conceive of right/wrong and consequence, a human moral/ethical compass. This leads to the conclusion that scruples are your undoing, a weakness which will give you away, even if you keep your mouth shut. Morals and ethics stratify people and make them suspicious, and they will and do know.

This book is about the transparency of our burdens/demons to others, how we give ourselves away, maybe subconsciously intentionally, as a human drawn to what is right, even if it is to our detriment.

In the bearded man there is a doppelganger of No Country's Anton Chigurh. Neither is evil, although this is what most would call it. It is pure amorality, outside and beyond evil, with no judgment. It is not about transgression or taboo, humans carrying no special status, no different than an animal or insect. The bearded man explains to Culla, "...I like to keep a good fire. A man never knows what all might chance along..." More correctly, like unthinking moths to flame, it's a good way to pull victims/prey in. It's not murder, but simply another day of wretched human existence, taking all things as they come, consuming and moving on, with no moral or ethical rudder whatsoever. This is a very difficult character to create, and so difficult to understand, yet McCarthy's worlds feature them consistently.

As we see so clearly in his other works, this is a tale with its origins in and major events turning on happenstance. I wonder: does this have to do with the ruminations on fate? The tinker happens to find the baby (or is it really chance?). Culla happens upon events where he falls under suspicion, and stumbles upon the bearded man twice. Do these encounters have a Jungian connection, elements of inevitability, undiscerned purpose? Or is purpose the weak and shallow human attempt to assign meaning in the now and after the fact?

And what then is outer dark? McCarthy uses it only twice, both in the context of the home. Light is in the home, the dark is outside and beyond. This is where all safety and security end, where the worst things happen, where nightmares turn real, where everything bad lies in predatory wait, watching what is inside the light, covetous and scheming. We live in the light, and it--not he or she--waits in the outer dark, watching us, with no care, compassion or mercy, and with no capacity for any.

And as always, such lovely, lovely McCarthy prose:
* "...the weedstem twirling in his mouth and the threadthin shadow of it going long and short upon his face like a sundial's hand beneath a sun berserk..."
* "...she looked like something replevied by grim miracle from the ground and sent with tattered windings and halt corporeality into the agony of sunlight..."
* "...waiting in a throb of violent constraint..."

Yes, you'll get some vocab education, as in all McCarthy works, with camarine, anthroparian, morkin, gracelon and more.

Bottom line: This is a horrible tale of shattered family and lives, murder and the most base barbarity, from the outset a tale of betrayal, deception, pain, doubt and loss, another McCarthy story exploring the bleakness of our existence. But as always, the setting is the wondrous and beautiful outdoors, the simple country and its vegetation, magnificent, the unimaginably pure and singularly beautiful in its quietude and form out-of-doors where men consume other men, and what is left behind soon enough is consumed as well, leaving the most scant evidence of our passing.

Cormac McCarthy grabbed me with both THE ROAD and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, and so I decided to explore some of his earlier works. The first thing one notices upon doing so is that McCarthy's own writing style has changed dramatically. Whereas the more recent novels use sparse writing to evoke powerful emotions, his past works are far more verbose, with run on sentences filled with all the adjectives one could imagine. In my opinion, I prefer the sparse writing instead.

But the earlier writing style is not so distracting as to eclipse the story. Typical for McCarthy, it is not a happy one. A young woman gives birth to a baby sired by her brother. When the brother leaves the newborn in the wild to die, telling his sister that it died while she slept, the baby is discovered by another who takes it as his own. When the sister discovers the lie and goes hunting for the baby, both brother and sister take paths through the wilderness leading from danger to danger.

Like Anton Chigurh, the one man killing machine in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, who has no known history and is as lethal as an inhuman force of nature, OUTER DARK has its own cluster of human psychopathy. A trio of travelers killing those they meet, with no reason provided, haunt the pages and bring destruction with them simply for its own sake. The two times Culla, the brother, meets up with this trio, there is a vague sense of violence underlying the encounters. The reader cannot help but wonder exactly who these people are, how could they ever have met and developed the kinship that they apparently share, and what is their purpose. None of these questions have answers.

McCarthy keeps the reader off balance through excellent use of subtleties. The whispered query of whether Culla should be shot, the 'mystery meat', and the missing eyeball, all create a bizarre sense that something seriously is out of place. But, although we might have our ideas (often too disturbing to really consider), we cannot put our finger on exactly what that something might be.

That the sister hunts for her lost child against all odds is, perhaps, McCarthy holding out some hope for us in an otherwise bleak and violent environment. Though in the end, hope is not enough, in McCarthy's world, to get us where we need to be. OUTER DARK may not be pleasant, but it is the work of an excellent author who explores those shadowy regions many authors fear to tread, and who has rightfully earned the reputation of a master.

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode island and grew up in Tennessee, but now lives in Tesuque, New Mexico. He is viewed by many as one of the more unusual and most talented of the current American writers. For example, Harold Bloom has written a number of things about McCarthy. I selected this book after reading pretty Horses. I was interested in some of his early work.

This is McCarthy's second novel published in 1970. The story is about a very poor brother and sister living in the rural south some time around 1900. The sister has a baby and the brother, Culla, does not want the baby and tells his sister it died and leaves it in the woods. The sister, Rinthy, does not believe him and sets out on a journey to find the baby. Simultaneously, Culla sets out on his own "dark" trip.

McCarthy has developed trademark prose, and some might not like it. He writes long rambling sentences to describe the natural setting and between he uses spartan narrative and dialogue.

The prose is complicated by design. I thought the prose was very effective in the middle of pretty Horses. He uses the same technique here but in a less developed way. He opens the book with just three sentences in one page, including one sentence 12 lines long. He reminds me a bit of the opening of Farewell to Arms where Hemingway tries to set the mood through the use of prose: Hemingway uses a narrative of the natural surroundings. McCarthy uses expressions such as "the sun sat blood red and elliptic" in his late book Pretty Horses" and here again we find the similar expression. Sometimes this prose seems out of place when compared to the spartan dialogue of a father and son talking over a breakfast of eggs and coffee.

Also, in later books McCarthy uses what is called polysyndeton, or the use of several conjunctions in close succession, especially where some might be omitted. It is a stylistic scheme used to slow down the tempo. As pointed out by others, polysyndeton is used extensively in the King James Version of the Bible. For example:

"And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark." Genesis 7:22-24

We see a bit of that here in the early work.

So, this a pretty dark novel about some poor people traveling around rural America set around 1900 or earlier. It is a short but entertaining read and gives us a picture of the young McCarthy as a writer.

Recommend: 4 or 5 stars.

Cormac McCarthy excels as an author in his ability to evoke the violent terror and primal corruption that lies just beneath the banal facade of common human experience. Outer Dark is at once ominous, brooding and powerful. It has all the features of the finest and most perverse Greek tragedies, combined with the tacit nihilism of the postmodern condition, in which the concepts of original sin, retribution and guilt have their own redoubled semantic.The story itself has been manifested in varying forms in written literature for ages and finds a correlate in ancient Greek, Biblical and Medieval mythico-religious themes.
It seems also that Outer Dark bears some connection to the literary tradition of Southern Gothic and has more than a slight affinity to the work of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. In addition this book would be especially appreciated by fans of McCarthy's earlier works such as Child of God, Suttree, The Orchard Keeper and his violent historigraphic masterpiece Blood Meridian.
Both in substance and form this book is a beautiful, yet disturbing literary accomplishment, one that succeeds in merging the depravity and horror of human emotions with the elegance and sublimity of humanity's highest artistic achievement.

Don't be put off by mediocre Matt Damon movie adaptations, Cormac McCarthy is one of America's greatest living authors, and without a doubt the most worthy successor to William Faulkner, his greatest influence. I prefer his earlier Appalachian novels (The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, and this one). Later in his career he moved out west with The Border Trilogy (All The Pretty Horses, Cities of the Plain, and The Crossing). Whichever you prefer, there is no doubt that McCarthy's beautiful, streaming prose masterfully depicts the horrors of the south and the west, and the evil in the hearts of men. In this novel, a young girl is impregnated by her brother, who then attempts to kidnap the baby, taking it out to the woods to dispose of it, all in the first few chapters. What follows are two epic journeys - those of each of the siblings, as they attempt to find the lost child. We follow them through their respective journeys, encountering both the mercy and evil that lie in the heart of man, ending in a bloody and unspeakable climax that will haunt you for days after finishing.
This is one of McCarthy's first novels, and as good as this novel is, he has gone on to hone his talent even further, becoming one of the true masters of 20th century American fiction. I would recommend this to anyone who is a fan of Faulkner, and any of the authors he has influenced over the decades. Like his influences, McCarthy is not easy reading by any means, but also like them, reading him is a substantially rewarding experience.

This book hints at profound wisdom, and it's dramatized expertly, but that's all highly esoteric and there's not much reason to go into the finer points here.

McCarthy has got the idiom of this bygone language down. It's often interesting to think why the characters choose the vocabulary they do, and it tells you something about the strong, silent type of masculinity, and the charming, gentle femininity that prevails (-/prevailed) in the West.

The lack of quotation marks isn't really confusing, and makes for an improved aesthetic experience (which, frankly, all phonetic-alphabet/Indo-European languages can use, with the possible exception of Arabic) (something will be lost when China takes up the Latin alphabet like South-East Asia).

The writing is highly ambitious, and tries hard to be the definitive last-word on this vale of tears -- you might almost say it was over-written. But things that try hard are good, because they sometimes succeed, in attaining great heights of achievement, and this book is one of the happy examples that do.

"Outer Dark" is the story of a brother and sister and their child. The child is born in a desperate cabin someplace in the Appalachian Mountains. The brother, Culla Holme, takes the newborn while the mother/sister sleeps and sets the child in the night woods. The child is found by an iterant tinker. The sister/mother, Rinthy Holme, awakes. She confronts her brother, they argue, and eventually both set out separately on the road--the sister to find the child and the brother for no reason other than perhaps desperation.

Once they are on the road, the book follows a classic journey narrative. The landscape is dark and strange. The people they meet even more so. A few of the chapters are perfectly written. There is a chapter about halfway through the book where Culla meets a snake hunter. Now there is nothing particularly important in this chapter as it relates to the rest of the novel--no important aspects of character revealed, not important action or theme, it is just a beautiful handful of pages that form a perfect circle. The dialogue is brilliant. The snake hunter talks about his well, his wife, his hounds, the neighbor with whom he still carries a feud despite the fact that the neighbor has been dead nearly a decade. The chapter is a great example of Faulkner's observation, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." This is true among certain communities in the South, but I also think it belongs to a broader class and generation of people; people who frame their individual and collective lives as narratives to live, relive, and pass along. And I suspect that the reason this chapter stands out for me is that unlike other chapters that rely on strangeness and cruelty for much of their emotional tension, this small chapter is, at least by McCarthy standards, benign. There are no corpses hanging from trees, no drooling mutes or eyeless crones or murdered infants. And I believe that these moments, moments that lean on something other than the weird or cruel, are McCarthy's best. And it is unfortunate that they are often overlooked for the sheer spectacle of his violence.

There are several things I found problematic in this novel. Firstly, there is a triad of evil men prowling the land. They are composite characters that we find in other McCarthy novels. There is the sentient evildoer, the learned man who pontificates the meaning of mankind. There is the cadre mutants, misshapen and nameless--in this case, one man is actually nameless. McCarthy never tells us where they come from or what motivates them. They are just there, a part of the landscape perhaps--a force birthed by the landscape. I don't know. I can only speculate and with very little evidence from the text. Now perhaps they are a reflection of real life, the evil we hear about on the evening news or witness through history. But so what, as I've heard time and again in workshop, life does not good fiction make. Perhaps my problem is that I do not necessarily believe in evil, but rather in motivation--in that people can be motivated to do some awful things. And good fiction is in that motivation. And it does not have to be much. I found the motivations toward evil in Blood Meridian convincing--racism, imperialism, greed, desperation, ceremony. But evil simply for evil's sake, or even as a reflection of some aspect of the human psyche, collective or individual, does not work and detracts from the overall effect of the work.

Then there is the issue of coincidence--or perhaps it is meant to be fate. Either way, the key events of the novel depend upon happenstance that felt incredible and I must say a bit contrived. The first time that Culla Holme meets the triad of evil, he is washed from a ferry on a flooded river. He stumbles into their camp to warm by the fire. And I am trying to figure out why this meeting feels so forced. I suspect that it has something to do with the needless drama of the ferry scene, a drama with no narrative significance other than to put Culla within view of the triad's fire. It would have felt more credible if no great event or drama preceded the meeting, or if some event of greater significance, an event tied inextricably to the progression of the novel, preceded their meeting. As it stands, the action packed ferry scene serves no purpose other than to position the characters.

And then it happens again. McCarthy creates an interesting, high drama scene involving a hog drive, thousands of animals driven through the mountains. One of the hog drivers is forced off a bluff by stampeding pigs. He dies and the blame is assigned to Culla. It is an interesting scene, the dialogue is sharp and the characters of the itinerant preacher and the hog drivers are vivid. They plan to hang Culla but don't have a rope. They march him back to camp for the proper hanging equipment--as one of the characters explains, it is the Christian thing to do. Culla jumps from the bluffs and into the river to escape. And guess where the next chapter finds him? Another river drama, another visit to the evildoer's camp.

A terrible act of violence beings the book to a close. It is turely awful, but it does complete the novel. And were it not for the questions raised by the unmotivated evil, and the coincidences that brought the characters together, the novel would be nearly perfect.

I can't help but wonder how McCarthy could solve the problems of the novel, though I suspect, given his other work from this period, he preferred to leave certain questions unanswered. And these things I label problems are in fact intentional. In any event, I believe an answer resides somewhere in that perfect chapter in the middle of the novel, the chapter with the snake hunter. The thing that makes this chapter work is what Charles Baxter calls rhyming action: "When narratives move in reverse--when they come dramatically or imagistically to a point that is similar to the one they already seemingly passed." I sense that is perhaps something of the intention in this work--much of it doubles back upon itself. One of the reasons the murder is so disturbing is that it had already been committed at the beginning of the work, when Culla left the newborn, naked, in the night woods. But the dramatic events, the river dramas, that bring about the final rhyming murder, ring dissonant with all that came previously. Even though they are repetitive, they stand out from the rest of the work and seem to develop in their own direction--a misplaced rhyme--until the writer pushes Culla into the river and gets him drifting in the right direction.

This is a beautifully written, almost poetic, book. I was reminded of the King James Bible, which has "and cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Still, I struggled to finish it because it's just so damn depressing. The characters drift through the story like lost souls in hell. The story reminds me of the book of Job, but without the happy ending. Comparisons to "The Road" are obvious. This book is just as dark, but in "The Road," I felt the father's love for his son and his determination to keep him alive in spite of the hopelessness of their situation. In "Outer Dark" I just did not care. For unique use of English this book deserves 5+ stars--I appreciated its artistry, but couldn't enjoy it.

This, much more so than the Orchard Keeper, feels like McCarthy's first full work. The narrative focus is much tighter, even if the paths that Culla and Rinthy take are every bit as shiftless and as doomed. But by the end of the book, Mccarthy has stepped well beyond the typical southern Gothic territory he spends most of his first novel treading through. Outer Dark, with it's central incestuous conflict, could easily have been just another novel about screwed-up Appalachian degenerates. Instead it launches itself into a space of morbid ceremonies, nightmarish pseudo-myths, and inexplicable, cyclical violence. It's not southern Gothic or even american Gothic as much as it is Gothic period. It's easy to see the jumping off points for the themes he would explore in Blood Meridian, The Crossing, et al here.

Reads as something of a practice run for his later works, particularly wrt dialogue. The archaic dialect is there in all its slightly jarring yet strangely melodious lilt, but the spoken word somehow lacks the ease with which it is rendered by characters in later novels. Yes, I know Appalachian in middle settler times was different from Border Texan in the early twentieth, but I still think speakers in this novel lack the casual confidence of authentic-in-character speech which is so impressive in his more recent novels.

The story is also less than smoothly told. As in his other novels I have read, it unfolds episodically as the chief characters migrate through and act upon a series of loosely coupled scenes, settings and stages, exposing character facets and flaws and depositing residues of learning in protagonists. There seems to be no plot as such. The story emerges, bit upon bit, as the characters progress from stage to stage across McCarthy's haunting landscapes. More so than in Crossings, Meridian or Old Men, the stages in Outer Dark are somehow more staged—more angular, stark, seemingly only just constructed: at times you can almost smell the drying paint. Not so the characters strutting these stages who are typically sharply drawn with a few deft strokes, distinctive (if not entirely comfortable) dialogue, and undisguised character. The stages they inhabit may be a little raw: they are not.

The story that emerges is something of a morality fairy-tale. The two chief characters each unknowingly follow a road leading them to their just deserts. The brother is tragedy-prone throughout: yet he maintains an unquenchable air of naive willingness as he stumbles from stage to stage triggering tragedies of which he remains calmly unaware until the final confrontation. The sister exudes a grittier, more determined yet unprepossessing and diffident demeanour, always being well received and even better treated until the chilling conclusion. Driving everything is McCarthy's inventiveness. Scenes and stages, characters, events, the very premise from which all flows, are a tour de force of imagination.

What most impressed me about this novel was that so many things could be conveyed without even being described. In many scenes, one somehow knows what has happened even though McCarthy has never actually told us so. There are some brilliant examples of communication through suggestion. Here is one example: Near the beginning of the novel we find some horrific descriptions of violence and gore. This primes us to expect more. But for the rest of the novel, the violence and gore are never really stated but only hinted. But after this priming, hints are even better than statements. The hints make the imagination run wild, and turn out to be even more effective than explicit statements. After the early explicit scenes, we are ready to jump or cry at any hint. And I do mean "cry". This is not simply a horror story. There is something heartwrenching about it. I also want to point out that some of the reviewers are mistaken in calling this novel a "western". The way the characters speak is clearly Appalachian.

Having read "The Road," "Blood Meridian," and "Child of God," I have come to expect anything and everything from McCarthy. Of course there is always the Faulknerian prose, which sometimes trumps that of Faulkner himself. Then of course there is the violence. But it is never violence for violence's sake. McCarthy is saying something about humanity and the world we have all created. The fact that the author was capable of thinking up such horrific experiences proves that it does or at least could happen in real life. If his mind has conjured it, it is as human as anything else. Besides, McCarthy didn't invent the concept of incest, infanticide, or other forms of general depravity. He sees it in the world and wants all of us to see it as well. Is it hard to swallow? Of course. I am never one to be disturbed by art, but even the end of this novel caused a cringe and wince. The absolute best element of this novel is the way McCarthy plays off the traditional Southern style of writing a la Mark Twain. "Outer Dark" is completely episodic, following Rinthy's and Culla's respective travels through the Tennessee hill country. There's even a riverboat scene! It is utterly brilliant how McCarthy uses a traditional template while remaining original. If you do not like lyrical prose or wanton violence or emotionally distant characters, you will not like McCarthy's work. If you enjoy experiencing something new and often times shocking, you will love his work!

Not only darkness, but dust and water, attonement and discontent, where two siblings search for nothing on a deathscape worn like a shroud by three dark figures riding through the novel bareback and malicious, relentless in their dealing with the locals who happen to be circumstance's appetite, search of a child that ends with a sucking in of breath, the deep dark things that await the blind. It'll make you feel like you've only caught a whisper of actual events but've been exposed to an underworld of secret ones. McCarthy brews characters with oil and mud and sets them up like wildcats on a barren neo-Medieval world to sort out their fates and differences, a place populated with bird calls and vermins waiting to die. A candlelight novel if there was one, mold creeping up around the yellow curled corners of the pages. A winter tale.

A beautifully written novel. Virtually a full length poem. But to what end? There’s a scrap of a story here, but it doesn’t go anywhere. I was looking forward to reading my first novel by Cormac McCarthy. But this may also be my last.

Cormac McCarthy caught a lot of mainstream attention with All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and most recently, The Road. Those who venture back into McCarthy's earlier work will be enthralled and frustrated, invigorated and dismayed. McCarthy's more dated prose is, at times, more accessible than Faulkner's (a common comparison), and at others, equally as dense. Curious readers who are only familiar with more contemporary work will not be shocked to find graphic depictions of violence (Blood Meridian), anti-heroic protagonists (Child of God), or put-off by complex depictions of setting (Suttree). While these elements are expected (in certain measure), the reader may, at times, be overwhelmed by the volume / manifestation of these elements. So, reader beware: delving even further into McCarthy's work, one will find a taught, compact showcase of these hallmarks in his second novel, Outer Dark.
The tale is set in the early 1900 foothills / backwaters of Appalachia. A young girl (Rinthy) is giving birth to her brother's child. The brother (Culla) abandons the infant to the forest, and tries to convince her that it died from natural causes. In spite of the appalling circumstances of the child's birth, her maternal instincts are still strong-- she needs to see the body of the child if nothing more than for closure. Frustrated, Culla directs her to the spot in the woods where he left the baby, hoping that she will accept that it's where he buried the body. She needs more; she needs to actually see / hold the body, so she sets about trying to dig it up. Rinthy finds nothing, and Culla is forced to admit he left the baby to die in the forest. The best explanation they can surmise is that a passing "tinker" (traveling vendor) must have found and taken the child. This marks both the separation of the siblings and the beginning of their journeys: Rinthy's quest to find her baby, and Culla's "hunting" of his sister.
At the same time, there are three morbid, savage characters prowling the land, robbing, killing, and yes, even eating their prey. They are intermittently portrayed, and sparsely described, yet the image of Tolkien's wraiths in the Lord of the Ring trilogy keep coming to mind-- shadowy, terrifying creatures sweeping the landscape like a scourge. McCarthy's trio is translucently depicted-- although they feast on flesh and blood, they are not necessarily OF flesh and blood. Like the product of Culla and Rinthy's unnatural pairing, these marauders are abominations, but oddly enough, creatures with an other-worldly power / authority, like one of the Old Testament plagues sent to punish, correct, and stabilize the land. I am certainly not the first to draw a biblical allusion referencing McCarthy's work, and Outer Dark is certainly one of the strongest examples of the connection in theme, tone, and rhetoric.
Ultimately, the path of the wandering siblings and the three horsemen must cross. Without ruining the outcome for those who are interested, it should come as no surprise that it's a dismal, grotesque, and deeply unsettling fate. The reader will not be able to shake the image of what Culla encounters at the end of the novel. For those who believe in a sense of natural order, perhaps it is a deserved outcome; for those who believe in romantic notions of nobility and an innate sense of goodness within humanity, well, maybe a Nicholas Sparks novel would be more suitable. This is a brutal, almost fable-like tale that flouts notions of morality while ironically supporting such concepts through their omission. There is only one character that seems to do anything "honorable," and he is certainly not rewarded for it. This character is not Culla--he seems to be tracking Rinthy less out of any sense of genuine concern and more out of a sense of entitlement / ownership. Rinthy, while trying to locate her baby, is not doing so under the guidance of moral obligation-- it is simply a primal, biological drive pushing her along. She lacks any sort of cognition in the decision making process-- she has no idea where to find her child, or any real reason to believe that the man who she believes has possession of him actually does. The siblings are depicted as feral creatures given to impulse / instinct. If at times, they seem innocent, and at others, contemptible, it is because they are. It is with these same sorts of conflicted constructs that we consider animals-- some are wild and beyond the perimeters or "civility," and others might be promising pets if only given the benefits of "domesticity" and a sound breaking of their creature spirit.

I found Outer Dark to be the kind of novel that Faulkner would have written if he had been from Appalachia. Rife with symbolism and biblical allegory, Outer Dark takes the reader on a brother's journey to find his sister while also taking the sister on a journey in search of her baby that the brother has given away. The journey meanders past a slew of interesting characters on its way to its final outcome.

The biggest problem that I had with this one was that it felt too much like McCarthy was trying to do his best Faulkner impression. This was still early in McCarthy's career, and you can see the writer drawing from one of his influences in lieu of having his own writing style. Yet, McCarthy does Faulkner as well as anyone possiblty good other than Faulkner himself, so this does not detract too much from the book. It is still a very good story that introduces the reader to some interesting characters. This one isn't quite as good as some of his later works, but it is still a good book in its own right.

Cormac McCarthy never fails--for me anyway--to expose the darker side of humanity in a brilliant and thought provoking manner. McCarthy absolutely nailed the isolation, loneliness, and depravition that was common to this time and area. The dialect was spot on. McCarthy is a great descriptive writer, and the mental images of this story will stay with me for a very long time. If you ever want to start a book club, any one of McCarthy's books will keep the conversation flowing for hours.

Not McCarthy's best work, by a long shot. I give it a couple of stars for the dialogue, which seemed authentic and evoked the past. After a strong and interesting beginning, this story went nowhere. A disjointed and rambling work of gratuitous violence.

This is the fourth of McCarthy's novels I have read. "Blood Meridian" is darker and "The Road" is even more depressing, if that is possible. Believe me, it is. One wonders where this author can go with such a style. I still have some of his older books to read---and everything else he writes. I don't think he will disappoint. This book is a lovely--if I may use that word--excercise in language. He uses words (and rare, odd ones, at that) and imagery to evoke a truly depressing reading experience. This book is not for you if you expect a work full of uplifting thoughts and gentle sympathies. Some readers may require a good dictionary. If you grasp "...moiled cant and baneful...", then you can do without. Good luck.

The language of this relatively short novel is beautiful and haunting. Even though McCarthy's writing style has changed a little with each book over the past 40 years, each stage along the way has its own unique brilliance, and the somewhat sparce prose of "Outer Dark" is no exception. McCarthy has an ability like no other author I've read to describe a landscape - both exterior or interior - with such startling clarity and yet with such few words. McCarthy has no need for interior monologue, excessive dialogue, or an omniscient narrator; with the slightest subtle gestures he shares intimate and profound emotions and concepts with his reader. "Outer Dark" (as well as McCarthy's other works) is brilliant in this way.
The novel is also quite disturbing. Although they are only in a few short scenes, the mysterious trio, personifying the utter depths of (in)human violence and depravity, refuse to leave the reader's thoughts after the book has been finished. A couple of their scenes (really the only ones they appear in) left me with a very real sense of dread that didn't leave for a few days.
The actual violence of the book only takes up a couple pages of the entire novel, but as another reviewer stated, the feeling of the entire book is one of violence and oppressive fear. Once again, this is a testimony to McCarthy's mastery of language and storytelling. Because of this, the actual violence that there is is that much more powerful. I found this book in every way as disturbing as the much longer, much more violent "Blood Meridian."
From a literary standpoint, McCarthy's books are absolutely inspiring. His aesthetics present humanity at its basest, most fearsome state, but simultaneously shows slivers of the goodness and nobility in mankind, and maybe (I emphasize MAYBE) the hope that lays hidden beneath his horrifying portrait of existence.

I was/am very intrigued with Cormac McCarthy's writing style and prose. Right from the beginning you get a sense that he knows his craft and he knows it well. His clipped, descriptive sentences add much more color than you would think could be added to such a desolate setting. For example, "Holme swallowed the leached and tasteless wad of meat, his eyeballs tilting like a toad's with the effort." I was drawn into this book from the beginning.

At first there seemed a general theme to Outer Dark. Many abandoned buildings in a desolate and poor countryside and yet every person they met offered them food or a place to stay. The exception being Culla Holme, who invariably seemed to be chased by bad circumstances for what he did with his incestuous child. A kind of retribution was being enacted on him.

But this is where it got confusing. All of a sudden there would be a quick excerpt or scene of violence and death. You don't know why it happened or who did it, but it always happened just before or after a Culla chapter. So conclusions are drawn. We soon find out that it isn't him, that it is the villains of the novel. Culla himself runs into them several times as part of the retribution enacted for the incestuous relationship coupled with the attempted murder of his newborn son. Then the novel goes haywire and turns macabre and horror like, leaving you finishing the book not understanding anything, not understanding what the book was about. Perhaps I missed something.

I am definitely intrigued with McCarthy's style of writing and I will definitely read some of his other books. And I think I would find that this is a book more for the diehard McCarthy fans than it is for someone like myself who has never read any of his other novels. I would recommend McCarthy, but not necessarily this book.

3 stars.

Rinthy Holme gives birth to a baby that her brother sired, and then he takes off with it and tells her it died. The rest of the novel follows her as she hunts him down, and eventually we learn what fate does with them and with the unpleasant tinker and other characters involved. No one is to be trusted in this apocalyptic and well crafted story.

=Outer Dark= describes a barren Wasteland and Holme is the Grail King, complete with a wounded "leg" as a symbol of his inability to love acceptably. In a Wasteland where women are not valued, children are not nurtured either, and the child ends up burned and half-blinded, in the way that its father and his culture are blind to his disregard for his sister and their child. I love the poetic prose of this writer. And the words-- where does he get those words? Cormac McCarthy is the best writer writing in America today, similar to but better than Steinbeck and Faulkner.

I admit it. I am hooked on McCarthy. Working thru every published thing the man has written. Just finished Outer Dark moments ago. Once you have the "break through" into his writing, (getting used to paragraph long sentences and the stunning lack of commas), you get totally and completly sucked into his world. The smells, taste, awe, the horror. Usually. I know outer dark is an early work and it is, in itself, truly amazing. At the same time, I did not find myself as transported into the story as Suttree, a work of similar nature and setting.

I would recomend this book, but not as a first Cormac read. You want your socks knocked off? Read Blood Meridian. Hell, read them all....But be ready to be changed. There is no going back after McCarthy.

Cannibalism, incest, violence, shadows and morbidity are not images usually associated with the western genre. Cormac McCarthy combines these gothic horror elements with the "Tale of the Wandering Jew" to craft a novel that, while certainly a genre western in the classic sense (it is filled with outlaws, pioneers, gunfights, horses, etc.) manages to also defy catergorization.
This is not a novel for all readers. McCarthy is an aquired taste. The hope through regeneration and purgation is present but certainly takes a close reading to discover. I am not a fan of dark literature per se, but McCarthy posseses such a unique linguistic style, that he indeed weaves a magic tapestry around his narratives and seduces the reader. He also manages to breathe new life into a classic American genre by throwing a new spin at his audience.
Like the rest of McCarthy's novels, "Outer Dark" is on one hand extremely cinematic with its rich and dense imagery and yet completely unfilmable. In fact Jim Jarmasch's excellent but aquired taste "Dead Man" contains many scenes that could have been taken directly from "Outer Dark".
As with all westerns, McCarthy devotes a large portion of his storytelling to creating a vivid landscape. The natural world according to McCarthy is wide, expansive and filled with great dread and danger. The Wilderness is not a place for the meek- they do not get to inherit the earth according to McCarthy. His view is extremely Old Testement in that regard. The wild expanses of the undeveloped country is, in of itself a scourge angel where wickedness is to be purged.
"Outer Dark" is at times a difficult read. For those brave souls willing to take a chance on a risky work of art, I whole heartedly reccomend this unique novel.

McCarthy's characters always seem to be on the move (literally speaking), and it's an aspect he handles with such grace and vividness, you hope they will never stop their journey. His language is pure poetry, and I bet he could write on just about any subject, and I'd still be captivated.

Furthermore, he has an extraordinary ability to paint a picture of personalities, in just a few, short sentences. The main characters of his books (including this one) tend to have short encounters with a diverse crowd of people, and I feel we get a glimpse of the inner core of every last one of them.

An early masterpiece from the man I consider the absolute master of all living authors.

Throughout this book, even as I try to distance myself emotionally from it, McCarthy drew me in. His descriptions of characters and nature all around are creepy and far from natural. I kept wondering what the point of it all was. Why did he feel compelled to write this book? A sad tale and yet you find yourself not wanting to put it down and turn your back on it (something might leap out at you from behind.) No faith in humanity will you find here and certainly no comfort. No real ending as well. The despairing sister, searching desperately for her little "chap" is left out on the road, by her own choice and never heard from again. The three "monsters" are still out there, never explained, and you are left wondering why the brother, Culla, is never their victim, even after meeting them twice, other than the fact that the leader of this "unholy trinity" steals his boots, the one decent thing he owns, despite the fact he stole them himself. One thing is certain, I may not sleep well for several nights after reading this book.

One of those artsy fartsy novels with not much of a plot. McCarthy also despises punctuation marks. I'm sure there's all kinds of symbolism but it was just dark without much of any finalizing conclusion.

I have read most of McCarthy's books and look forward to reading the rest of them. This book didn't make sense to me it is kind of a collection of random events that happen to a brother and sister. Unlike his other books you don't really grow to care about the characters.

While I did appreciate McCarthy's prose, I can't say I enjoyed this book. The world is bleak to the point of hopelessness and the ending-that-wasn't-an-ending left me feeling betrayed. Not my cup of tea.

Clashing between meaness and kindness and harsh but of-its-own-grace rural south. The vernacular plucks you out of modern society and drops you in theirs where you are the vulnerable one. Intense and great.

This McCarthy novel about Appalachian poor white folk who say I reckon alot (I kept thinking of Billy Joe Thornton in Sling Blade) is a precursor to his fabulous bizarre travel book, The Road. Lots of action, lots of incomprehensible happenings, with many dark twisted characters, this book keeps one reading until the inconclusive climax.

I should start by saying I loved "The Road." I picked this book up at a lending library and I am glad I did not have to make a purchase. To me, the story quality trumps all, and "Outer Dark" can barely be called a story. . I think it was more of an exercise for Mr. McCarthy to show off his incredible writing skills. He succeeds in part, but he forgot that folks read novels, more than anything else, because they want to experience a good story. When I completed this book, I honestly felt I had wasted my time.

Like "The Road"; a rococo epic of misery; hopeless, bleak, expansive, empty, hideous and hero-less. In a good way. I wish there were a hundred more CM books. And I'm sorry I employed semicolons in this "review"

If you're considering buying the Peter Smith "edition" of this book, note that it is NOT a new "edition" in hardcover but the Vintage International edition rebound in red cloth, with the cover of said trade paperback glued onto the front. It looks like it's been rebound for libraries, not for sale to the general public. the store haven't seen fit to warn you of this, alas. The book is WELL-REBOUND, and may still be worth it to you Cormac McCarthy diehards out there -- it is for me, and ultimately I'm just gonna keep the copy of it I bought, but it's still quite disappointing. Thought you deserved a warning, hope it came in time.

Content-wise, not my type of book. It’s grotesque, corrupt in every sense, and extremely violent. And I didn’t really understand what it’s about except that essentially this is a hopelessly cruel world we live in. The stylistic lack of quotation marks did evoke an intriguing reaction from me. This manipulative device made it seem as though the dialogue was one with the narrative. I wonder why McCarthy employed this technique. What affect do the differences/similarities of the narrative prose, combined with the prose used by the characters, have on reading the book as a seamless whole? What was McCarthy trying to do? If anyone can help me figure this out, I’d appreciate it.

McCarthy's writing is mesmerizing. This is my first McCarthy book, and I am hoping that the feel of his other books is the same, but with better character development than Outer Dark. I found this book to be dark (no surprise) but the darkness was without merit. It was senseless confusion, gore and some of the characters were laughable in their supposedly meaningful insights. Many incidents in the book appeared without explanation. None the less, this book affected me and I am looking forward to reading more from this talented writer

A very disappointing novel.
Here are some things I like in books: 1) Character development. This means that the brother and the sister in the book would actually have to change, or at a minimum convey through actions or thought some insight they have gained. No luck there. 2) Plot development. This means that something would have to happen, as opposed to the same thing happening over and over. No luck there. 3) Some insight on the part of the author, some idea that gives the novel a focal point, or even message if you want to get didactic. No luck there, unless you consider "life is bleak" to be some sort of insight worth noting.
Here's what I don't like in books: 1) Inconsistent voice: the grand vocabulary of the narrator is so at odds with the characters that it's downright laughable. 2) Pointless and prolonged descriptions of nature. A creek. A path. Another creek. It didn't come alive for me -- it nearly put me to sleep. 3) Violence or other upsetting facts inserted solely to shock the reader. I can handle topics like incest and cannibalism if the author contextualizes them for the reader or provides some justification in the plot. This novel featured guys wandering around being mean, hangings, incest, cannibalism, and that always-ridiculous cliche of a character, the soft-spoken intelligent lead assassin with a squad of goons. Violence is often in fiction a cheap way out of plot problems. That isn't the case here, because there isn't a plot. 4) Pointless affectations like dialogue that isn't marked as such, forcing the reader to break the flow and squint to see who's talking.
Summarizing: if you're beguiled by a big vocabulary and love cheap horror thrills, this is the book for you.

I gave it one star because zero stars wasnt an option. Maybe probably the stupidest book I have ever read and I have read a lot of books. Had no plot and no point and was a total waste of my time. I kept reading hoping it would at least come to some kind of point but nope.. I will never read anything else by her. Total and completely useless book. In fact I wouldn't even call it a book it was so stupid.