Sunday 5 February 2012

BOOK OF THE WEEK: OUTER DARK by Cormac McCarthy


I was so excited when I discovered a Cormac book I hadn't read. OUTER DARK is about a brother and sister that live alone in the middle of nowhere. She has his baby and after its delivered he takes the baby and hides it in the woods where a trashy traveling salesman finds it. The brother, Culla Holmes, tells his sister Rinthy, that the baby died and that its buried in the back yard. She goes to dig it up and figures out the lie.
Eventually she leaves barefoot with only a dollar in her pocket to find her baby, chasing the only lead she has, the traveling salesman. Culla follows her. They meet various weirdos while traveling through a surreal and stark land.
Meanwhile 3 hillbilly graverobbing inbred flesheating evil motherfuckers are walking across the country hanging folks and fucking up shit.
The suspense builds, and as in any Cormac novel, the depressing shit builds to a crescendo of disheartening awfulness but his prose his so flowery and beautiful, one can't help but linger on and reread certain passages.....I highly recommend this book.
"Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth’s curve. He tried his foot in the mire before him and it rose in a vulvate welt claggy and sucking. He stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place."

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