Outer Dark

Outer Dark was the last McCarthy novel on my list, for no particular reason. This grotesque tale follows siblings Culla and Rinthy Holme on separate, dark journeys “a-huntin this here tinker” who took their days-old baby, abandoned by Culla in the woods. McCarthy wrote it during a transformative period, around the same time as The Orchard Keeper, while working from North Carolina, New Orleans, Tennessee, and even Ibiza. Among his early works, it stands out as one of the more accessible reads.

Like all of his other works, this book is brutal.

Some of the novel's events, so violent in nature, can be difficult to think about, but that's part of what lends the Biblical character to much of McCarthy's work, which is in large part what makes his books so unique a reading experience.

Mostly, though, I think there is much to be learned as a writer from examining McCarthy's works at a sentence level. He writes beautiful, poetic, epic sentences, and I can only hope to attempt emulation in my own work. 

McCarthy’s second novel is an underappreciated masterpiece, one that combines the author’s distinct style and notoriously difficult subject matter with a genuinely sublime vision of the world. Simultaneously a horror novel, a historical fiction, a Gnostic heresy, a cosmic joke, and act of spiritual seeking, I cannot recommend it enough.  

I am an unabashed Cormac McCarthy fan and this novel from 1968 is perfection in both mood and dialogue. I have always found it his best, surpassing even the superb The Road. In what feels to be Appalachia in the late 19th or early 20th century, Rinthy, a young orphan, lives in isolation with her brother, Culla, who impregnates her. When the child is born, Culla, consumed by guilt and fear of exposure, abandons the child in the woods, telling Rinthy the child has died when in fact it is stolen from its place of abandonment by a… show more.

A book from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author should always be on any list about teaching new writers. With Outer Dark, McCarthy goes down a violent and disturbing route that’s more art than book. Its graphic scenes and heavy plot material won’t even be the most disturbing aspects of this book. It’s the lack of setting and time that will trigger deep existential feelings of a primal sort of fear that is difficult to explain. The book takes place in the deep south of the United States (possibly) sometime in the past. But how far in the past? How much… show more.