Child of God

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... Read Full Review

McCarthy even goes so far as to force the reader to *identify* with Lester Ballard.... Not Ballard the serial killer, or Ballard the necrophiliac, but rather that "misplaced and loveless simian" scavenging the Tennessee backwoods for some handhold of purpose and adulation. A grizzled wood troll haunting the rutted roads of civilized men, he becomes a secret collector of beautiful objects, the corpses of his victims laid... Read Full Review

This may be the scariest ride in contemporary American fiction. A tale of the crazed Lester Ballard and his gradual slide into absolute depravity--necrophilia is just the beginning of it--this is dark, dark stuff. It could have been merely a freak show in prose, but fortunately we're in the hands of a master stylist, who makes this a rich, haunting, blackly comic experience. Nor is the violence extraneous to the point,... Read Full Review

No one finishes Child of God with an indifferent impression. Usually I'm sad to finish a good book, but I was happy when this one was over. Child of God is not a modern day morality tale but a complex book that produces a healthy confusion of pleasure and disquietude. The pleasure is derived from the beautiful language, language especially effective when used to describe a character. It's the subject matter which made... Read Full Review

"Child of God" is the story of Lester Ballard, outcast, necrophiliac, and psychopath in the Tennessee mountains. I'm sure some people would find this subject matter repellent, but I think the book has just enough of a lyrical quality to keep it from being too distasteful. In the hands of a less talented writer, it could have degenerated into a silly Stephen King-type horror story. In about two hundred pages, Cormac McCarthy... Read Full Review