Outer Dark

I read this book in the first couple days of a road trip across the United Sates. I finished it five days ago and am still stunned by this work's ending. An absolute must read.

This book serves as a perfect introduction to McCarthy's greatest works, particularly Blood Meridian and Suttree. In reading this relatively short work, one gains a sense of what it is like to step into a McCarthy landscape. For reading his works is more like entering some preternatural world than following your typical plot and glimpsing into depths of an individual character. Indeed, it is more like walking straight into some sort of warped medieval landscape, as a picture by Bosch or Breughel, than reading a narrative or following a plot line. One gradually finds one's self engulfed in a visionary realm with tentacles only thinly attached to a "realistic" one. And, as indicated by the title, this world is unremittingly bleak. And this work, like all McCarthy's best, leaves us pondering anew the same question: Why, for what purpose, is man thrown into this nightmare of a world? Or, as McCarthy puts it here, "He wondered where the blind man was going and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way."

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.

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.