Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic reso... (show more)
Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution. (show less)
With the movie success of "No Country For Old Men" and Oprah's Book Club choice of "The Road", I hope that a lot of people will start to explore th... (show more)
With the movie success of "No Country For Old Men" and Oprah's Book Club choice of "The Road", I hope that a lot of people will start to explore the works of Cormac McCarthy. He is a great writer. His stories tend to be relentlessly bleak, but they are compelling. His writing causes a visceral reaction. It is worth the trip.
Outer Dark is an odyssey and a quest. McCarthy's stories come alive in places we can feel. The uneasy sense of danger and the strangeness of the characters are real and vivid. A brother and sister live in isolation in the forest on a hill in Appalachia. To her, the outside world is only a rumor, and to him it's a place not to be trusted.
In a nutshell, she gives birth to his baby. He takes the baby out to the forest and abandons it to the elements telling her it died. Someone finds the baby and takes it. She leaves home for the first time in her life to seek her baby in an utterly alien world. He takes after her to bring her back. They are both at sea following their primitive urges.
I couldn't help thinking of "Cold Mountain" as I read it. A journey through a frequently hostile back-woods Appalachian country. Both are bleak odysseys. But "Cold Mountain" is full of sympathy and emotion, "Outer Dark" is unsentimental and real. I guess they are both fairy tales of a sort, but "Outer Dark" is the kind of fairy tale that the Grimms collected of a harsh world without any promises of a happy future.
If "Outer Dark" is too cheery for you then try "Child of God". (show less)
Published in 1968, Outer Dark, is McCarthy's second novel. The black and pessimistic view of human nature, McCarthy's trademark, is there, and the... (show more)
Published in 1968, Outer Dark, is McCarthy's second novel. The black and pessimistic view of human nature, McCarthy's trademark, is there, and themes which emerge in later books are touched upon.
There were, however, some fairly rudimentary issues which kept me from being fully engaged with this book. For some reason McCarthy likes his characters to be as anonymous as possible, seldom referring to them by name. This, and the fact that he does not give us much in the way of physical description, made it very hard for me to picture Rinthy and Culla Holme and to care about them as people. Sure, we know that they live in the bleakest of circumstances (that’s pretty much a given for McCarthy’s characters) and that they are impoverished on all levels, but it is not until nearly half-way through the book that we learn the age of Rinthy. This matters. I do not necessarily need to know that Rinthy is nineteen years old, but it would have helped tremendously when trying to form an image of her, if I’d been given an indication of her age. Until that point, she could have been anywhere from thirteen to forty-five (roughly, the child-bearing years).
One of the other questions I had was why Rinthy suspected the tinker of taking the baby. Culla, himself, didn’t know this when he finally took her into the woods to the spot where he claimed to have buried the body. After hearing an alligator in the first few pages, my initial concern, had I been Rinthy, would have been that the child had met a worse fate than being taken up by a passing tinker. I had further questions about the fate of the baby. Was it the burnt, one-eyed child that Culla eventually finds or not? If it was, how did the child wind up with these men? I’m all for a bit of ambiguity, but there are some questions that do need answers if the reader is to believe the story. Otherwise, it just seems conveniently coincidental. (show less)
I just....
I liked the first 3/4's of the book, and then it just sort of went, "What the fuck?" on me. Why is there a random flash back? Why does everyone just ALL OF A SUDDEN OUT OF NO WHERE come across what they were looking for? And what the fuck is with the pig scene?
I understand how you could read into every page of this book, but for the most part, I felt like it was a collection of discussions that McCarty really wanted to have with people and never did. The end was ambiv... (show more)
I just....
I liked the first 3/4's of the book, and then it just sort of went, "What the fuck?" on me. Why is there a random flash back? Why does everyone just ALL OF A SUDDEN OUT OF NO WHERE come across what they were looking for? And what the fuck is with the pig scene?
I understand how you could read into every page of this book, but for the most part, I felt like it was a collection of discussions that McCarty really wanted to have with people and never did. The end was ambivalent to the rest of the narrative and came from out of no where. The only resolution that seemed natural was for Rinthy, everyone else was just fucking absurd.
Maybe I just don't get it. Maybe it's just that I'm not a fan of American fiction. Maybe this book was just God awful. Who knows? Either way, it took two days to read all told and wasn't worth the effort to finish.
In short: Good for awhile and then what the fuck? (show less)
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This is an intensely bleak and blisteringly well-written allegory of the end of the human condition. If you're a parent, you probably don't want to read this. Or if you like kids at all.
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