Outer Dark
Book description
By Cormac McCarthy, the author of the critically acclaimed Border Trilogy, Outer Dark is a novel at once mythic and starkly evocative, set in an unspecified place in Appalachia sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; the brother leaves the baby in…
Why read it?
4 authors picked Outer Dark as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
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.
From Hugh's list on the world as a dream.
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…
From Mary's list on southern themes you’ve never heard of (maybe).
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…
From T.L's list on for aspiring horror authors.
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