Outer Dark Reviews

• The Western redone as gothic horror

  
  By A1LP6O85Z894GT on 2001-05-17
  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.
  
  

• A wellcrafted consistent lyrical trek thru a Hell of sorts

  
  By on 1997-07-21
  Cormac McCarthy shows himself decisively to be the author who later develops into the eminent American maestro of the mysterious metaphor in this early work Outer Dark. A writer known more for his ingenuity as a wordsmith and perfection of metaphor than for complicated plots or rich characterization, McCarthy has crafted this early novel around a simple premise--simple but no less eerie for its simplicity. The story follows an orphaned brother and sister aged around 20 years who spawn a child between them which the brother steals and leaves for dead in the nearby Appalachian forest--telling his sister that the baby died. A traveling salesman finds the child in the forest and takes the baby with him. The sister catches her brother in his lie and sets out across the surrounding towns and countryside in search of the baby for the next year or so. The brother likewise sets out in search of work and his sister. Their brief but spooky adventures in search of the baby and each other comprise the remainder of the book. By virtue of his craft, McCarthy slowly reveals the world through which the siblings search to be the very landscape of a sort of living Hell dominated by horrible luck and a sub-Miltonic evil trinity. Readers who enjoyed Blood Meridian will not be let down; will perhaps even be more impressed by parts. This book actually contains a 5 page passage that is arguably richer than the best of Blood Meridian. Describing the brother running from the forest after leaving his child for dead, McCarthy writes, "He did not come upon the river but upon the creek again. Or another creek. He followed it down, in full flight now, the trees beginning to close him in, malign and baleful shapes that reared like enormous androids provoked at the alien insubstantiality of this flesh colliding among them."
  
  

• Step Outside

  
  By AT2R7ZVT7QYOU on 2003-11-06
  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."
  
  

• Beautiful and terrifying.

  
  By ANNMHVOXZQU2K on 2003-11-24
  Don't be put off by mediocre Matt Damon movie adaptations, Cormac McCarthy is one of America's greatest living authors, and without a doubt the most worthy successor to William Faulkner, his greatest influence. I prefer his earlier Appalachian novels (The Orchard Keeper, Child of God, and this one). Later in his career he moved out west with The Border Trilogy (All The Pretty Horses, Cities of the Plain, and The Crossing). Whichever you prefer, there is no doubt that McCarthy's beautiful, streaming prose masterfully depicts the horrors of the south and the west, and the evil in the hearts of men. In this novel, a young girl is impregnated by her brother, who then attempts to kidnap the baby, taking it out to the woods to dispose of it, all in the first few chapters. What follows are two epic journeys - those of each of the siblings, as they attempt to find the lost child. We follow them through their respective journeys, encountering both the mercy and evil that lie in the heart of man, ending in a bloody and unspeakable climax that will haunt you for days after finishing.

  This is one of McCarthy's first novels, and as good as this novel is, he has gone on to hone his talent even further, becoming one of the true masters of 20th century American fiction. I would recommend this to anyone who is a fan of Faulkner, and any of the authors he has influenced over the decades. Like his influences, McCarthy is not easy reading by any means, but also like them, reading him is a substantially rewarding experience.
  
  

• Jerky, but Worth It

  
  By on 2002-01-17
  In this book, as well as all his others, Cormac McCarthy's prose is unrivaled. For sheer narrative prose power, this book may be the best thing I've read...ever. But, as superlative as the writing is, it's easy to tell this is one of McCarthy's very early works. Although the book is powerful and haunting in theme and symbolism, it comes up wanting in both plot and characterization.

  McCarthy never really lets us get to know his characters or the fears and desires that drive them and that keeps us distanced from them. Sometimes this distancing works to a writer's advantage, but I think The Outer Dark would definitely have been improved had we been allowed to know the characters a bit better.

  Plot is where this book really falls apart. Where McCarthy's later books are seamlessly plotted, The Outer Dark contains some jarring jumps and omissions in the storyline that can leave the more discriminating reader in the lurch.

  Cormac McCarthy long ago evolved into one of America's finest writers ever. As such, The Outer Dark is a book well worth reading, but if you're new to McCarthy, I'd read his later works first, then backtrack. The final analysis: more than a little jerky, but well worth anyone's time.
  
  

• A Tale of Darkness and Descent
  By on 1998-12-30
  Not only darkness, but dust and water, attonement and discontent, where two siblings search for nothing on a deathscape worn like a shroud by three dark figures riding through the novel bareback and malicious, relentless in their dealing with the locals who happen to be circumstance's appetite, search of a child that ends with a sucking in of breath, the deep dark things that await the blind. It'll make you feel like you've only caught a whisper of actual events but've been exposed to an underworld of secret ones. McCarthy brews characters with oil and mud and sets them up like wildcats on a barren neo-Medieval world to sort out their fates and differences, a place populated with bird calls and vermins waiting to die. A candlelight novel if there was one, mold creeping up around the yellow curled corners of the pages. A winter tale.
  
  
• The Outer Dark Relected from Within
  By A1977ZR4KQYZ4J on 2002-08-06
  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.
  
  
• Conveying without saying
  By A1E8JE7ZU91ZS5 on 2001-08-28
  What most impressed me about this novel was that so many things could be conveyed without even being described. In many scenes, one somehow knows what has happened even though McCarthy has never actually told us so. There are some brilliant examples of communication through suggestion. Here is one example: Near the beginning of the novel we find some horrific descriptions of violence and gore. This primes us to expect more. But for the rest of the novel, the violence and gore are never really stated but only hinted. But after this priming, hints are even better than statements. The hints make the imagination run wild, and turn out to be even more effective than explicit statements. After the early explicit scenes, we are ready to jump or cry at any hint. And I do mean "cry". This is not simply a horror story. There is something heartwrenching about it. I also want to point out that some of the reviewers are mistaken in calling this novel a "western". The way the characters speak is clearly Appalachian.
  
  
• This guy gives me goosebumps
  By A8UOUUPILH94B on 2005-09-28
  And I feel blessed when i read him and I pity those who have tried and will try to measure up to him. He is the modern Hugo and Baudelaire wrapped into one. His work will do surgery on your sense of literature, and I don't say that lightly!
  
  
• The Inner Darkness of the American Spirit
  By A2LP7XAZ7KMU8Z on 2006-10-17
  This is the third book I've read by Cormac McCarthy. One thing that impresses me about his work is how well he's captured the endemic American inclination to do violence. His characters ring true. They are typical Americans - like those who in our time vote repeatedly for Bush, clamor for war, support the death penalty, are willing to tortures hapless prisoners, and passionately announce that such-and-such a country should be bombed back to the Stone Age. McCarthy has captured America. What a country!
  
  
• Scary...intense...wow
  By on 1997-01-31
  McCarthy's Outer Dark, one of his earlier works, is gothic fiction from the days of Isak Dinesen. A brother and sister give birth to a child, which the brother leaves out in the woods to die, but a midget cobbler comes along and takes the child away. When the mother wants the child back, she goes on a search for it, and is soon followed by her brother and lover. This is a novel that crosses Brothers Grimm with Louis L'Amour. It is a western with the heart of fable and horror and fairy tale. This novel brings out McCarthy in his essence, shows a stepping stone towards his National Book Award, but is well worth a read in its own right.
  
  
• Appalachian Painted Bird
  By on 2001-02-10
  Those who savored every word of McCarthy's "Blood Meridian" will, as Bloom puts it, "read deeply" into this book as well. It reminded me of the story line of Kozinski's "The Painted Bird", but with a texture that only McCarthy can evoke. This is a gothic fable constructed from tightly and expressively written vignettes, with passages of descriptive natural beauty juxtaposed to deeply contorted descriptions of imaginative and vivid cruelty. McCarthy is a master at "setting the scene" clearly and his characters, at once both foreign and familiar, are sympathetic yet unfathomable. This book is constructed with two parallel aimless, but purposeful, quests of a brother and sister in 19th Century Tennessee(?)backwoods, and their collosion course with three apocalyptic terrors, which may be leftovers from McCarthy's exploration into the cold, detached villains he so well develops in Glanton and The Judge of "Blood Meridian". McCarthy's deftness is well exhibited in this magnificent, yet troubling, story. He says more by saying less; he leads us to imagine by providing innuendo and hints followed by cold, detached descriptions. Culla and Rinthy Holme's world is one where survival is punctuated by hunger, arbitrary violence, poverty and profound ignorance, but simple scenes of human struggles and kindness as well. Very highly recommended.
  
  
• Not Quite What I Expected
  By on 2003-06-19
  This book was my first experience with the work of Cormac McCarthy. A friend mentioned that his writing resembles that of Faulkner's and as I am a huge Faulkner fan, I couldn't resist. However, I was somewhat disappointed. While the grotesque characters and poverty-stricken environments emulate those often found in Faulkner's novels, the prose itself lacked the lyrical and complex quality of Faulkner's words. Still, the plot was rather dark and intriguing and McCarthy vividly depicts the desperation and depravity inherent in each character. Definitely worth reading.
  
  
• A Hammer Blow
  By A2G0QSOGRS38FU on 2005-08-23
  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.
  
  
• A gripping, taught, harrowing read
  By AEQFYOI6YJ83Z on 2008-01-24
  A sister gives birth to her brother's child. The brother takes the infant into the woods, where it is found by a travelling salesman. When the girl finds out about her brother's deception, she heads out to find the salesman, as her brother heads out to find her. All the while, they are pursued by three murderous, mysterious strangers, hellbent on an agenda all their own.
  
  There's a lot in "Outer Dark" that is just plain confusing; I'm still not entirely sure who leaves home first, the sister or the brother, or even the brother's reason for leaving. It doesn't matter, though; this novel isn't supposed to be an easy read. No McCarthy novel is. It's supposed to be an HONEST read--and it certainly is that. So honest you will sometimes wince; the cannibalism scene, while never fully stated, is still so disturbing you'll cringe in disgust and fear as you read. And the final scene around the fire...well, I won't go into more, for fear of spoiling it for you. Save it to say that this one will cause you some nightmares; hopefully, it'll get you thinking about your own life as well. What would you do for the ones you love? What would you do for yourself?
  
  
• New to Cormac McCarthy
  By A2HAZZIJ0YPEJR on 2002-09-17
  McCarthy's writing is mesmerizing. This is my first McCarthy book, and I am hoping that the feel of his other books is the same, but with better character development than Outer Dark. I found this book to be dark (no surprise) but the darkness was without merit. It was senseless confusion, gore and some of the characters were laughable in their supposedly meaningful insights. Many incidents in the book appeared without explanation. None the less, this book affected me and I am looking forward to reading more from this talented writer
  
  
• How dark does it get?
  By ADK7VC7CROJVC on 2006-12-20
  This is the fourth of McCarthy's novels I have read. "Blood Meridian" is darker and "The Road" is even more depressing, if that is possible. Believe me, it is. One wonders where this author can go with such a style. I still have some of his older books to read---and everything else he writes. I don't think he will disappoint. This book is a lovely--if I may use that word--excercise in language. He uses words (and rare, odd ones, at that) and imagery to evoke a truly depressing reading experience. This book is not for you if you expect a work full of uplifting thoughts and gentle sympathies. Some readers may require a good dictionary. If you grasp "...moiled cant and baneful...", then you can do without. Good luck.
  
  
• The Wasteland and the Grail King
  By A32DU4XZSCD30R on 2007-01-02
  =Outer Dark= describes a barren Wasteland and Holme is the Grail King, complete with a wounded "leg" as a symbol of his inability to love acceptably. In a Wasteland where women are not valued, children are not nurtured either, and the child ends up burned and half-blinded, in the way that its father and his culture are blind to his disregard for his sister and their child. I love the poetic prose of this writer. And the words-- where does he get those words? Cormac McCarthy is the best writer writing in America today, similar to but better than Steinbeck and Faulkner.
  
  
• Great book for McCarthy fans
  By A3SI6F1RGCTAOH on 2007-06-20
  "Outer Dark" is the story of a brother and sister and their child. The child is born in a desperate cabin someplace in the Appalachian Mountains. The brother, Culla Holme, takes the newborn while the mother/sister sleeps and sets the child in the night woods. The child is found by an iterant tinker. The sister/mother, Rinthy Holme, awakes. She confronts her brother, they argue, and eventually both set out separately on the road--the sister to find the child and the brother for no reason other than perhaps desperation.
  
  Once they are on the road, the book follows a classic journey narrative. The landscape is dark and strange. The people they meet even more so. A few of the chapters are perfectly written. There is a chapter about halfway through the book where Culla meets a snake hunter. Now there is nothing particularly important in this chapter as it relates to the rest of the novel--no important aspects of character revealed, not important action or theme, it is just a beautiful handful of pages that form a perfect circle. The dialogue is brilliant. The snake hunter talks about his well, his wife, his hounds, the neighbor with whom he still carries a feud despite the fact that the neighbor has been dead nearly a decade. The chapter is a great example of Faulkner's observation, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." This is true among certain communities in the South, but I also think it belongs to a broader class and generation of people; people who frame their individual and collective lives as narratives to live, relive, and pass along. And I suspect that the reason this chapter stands out for me is that unlike other chapters that rely on strangeness and cruelty for much of their emotional tension, this small chapter is, at least by McCarthy standards, benign. There are no corpses hanging from trees, no drooling mutes or eyeless crones or murdered infants. And I believe that these moments, moments that lean on something other than the weird or cruel, are McCarthy's best. And it is unfortunate that they are often overlooked for the sheer spectacle of his violence.
  
  There are several things I found problematic in this novel. Firstly, there is a triad of evil men prowling the land. They are composite characters that we find in other McCarthy novels. There is the sentient evildoer, the learned man who pontificates the meaning of mankind. There is the cadre mutants, misshapen and nameless--in this case, one man is actually nameless. McCarthy never tells us where they come from or what motivates them. They are just there, a part of the landscape perhaps--a force birthed by the landscape. I don't know. I can only speculate and with very little evidence from the text. Now perhaps they are a reflection of real life, the evil we hear about on the evening news or witness through history. But so what, as I've heard time and again in workshop, life does not good fiction make. Perhaps my problem is that I do not necessarily believe in evil, but rather in motivation--in that people can be motivated to do some awful things. And good fiction is in that motivation. And it does not have to be much. I found the motivations toward evil in Blood Meridian convincing--racism, imperialism, greed, desperation, ceremony. But evil simply for evil's sake, or even as a reflection of some aspect of the human psyche, collective or individual, does not work and detracts from the overall effect of the work.
  
  Then there is the issue of coincidence--or perhaps it is meant to be fate. Either way, the key events of the novel depend upon happenstance that felt incredible and I must say a bit contrived. The first time that Culla Holme meets the triad of evil, he is washed from a ferry on a flooded river. He stumbles into their camp to warm by the fire. And I am trying to figure out why this meeting feels so forced. I suspect that it has something to do with the needless drama of the ferry scene, a drama with no narrative significance other than to put Culla within view of the triad's fire. It would have felt more credible if no great event or drama preceded the meeting, or if some event of greater significance, an event tied inextricably to the progression of the novel, preceded their meeting. As it stands, the action packed ferry scene serves no purpose other than to position the characters.
  
  And then it happens again. McCarthy creates an interesting, high drama scene involving a hog drive, thousands of animals driven through the mountains. One of the hog drivers is forced off a bluff by stampeding pigs. He dies and the blame is assigned to Culla. It is an interesting scene, the dialogue is sharp and the characters of the itinerant preacher and the hog drivers are vivid. They plan to hang Culla but don't have a rope. They march him back to camp for the proper hanging equipment--as one of the characters explains, it is the Christian thing to do. Culla jumps from the bluffs and into the river to escape. And guess where the next chapter finds him? Another river drama, another visit to the evildoer's camp.
  
  A terrible act of violence beings the book to a close. It is turely awful, but it does complete the novel. And were it not for the questions raised by the unmotivated evil, and the coincidences that brought the characters together, the novel would be nearly perfect.
  
  I can't help but wonder how McCarthy could solve the problems of the novel, though I suspect, given his other work from this period, he preferred to leave certain questions unanswered. And these things I label problems are in fact intentional. In any event, I believe an answer resides somewhere in that perfect chapter in the middle of the novel, the chapter with the snake hunter. The thing that makes this chapter work is what Charles Baxter calls rhyming action: "When narratives move in reverse--when they come dramatically or imagistically to a point that is similar to the one they already seemingly passed." I sense that is perhaps something of the intention in this work--much of it doubles back upon itself. One of the reasons the murder is so disturbing is that it had already been committed at the beginning of the work, when Culla left the newborn, naked, in the night woods. But the dramatic events, the river dramas, that bring about the final rhyming murder, ring dissonant with all that came previously. Even though they are repetitive, they stand out from the rest of the work and seem to develop in their own direction--a misplaced rhyme--until the writer pushes Culla into the river and gets him drifting in the right direction.
  
  
• Wait, that's how it ends?
  By A3H2CKTFZ3B3GD on 2007-07-10
  I was/am very intrigued with Cormac McCarthy's writing style and prose. Right from the beginning you get a sense that he knows his craft and he knows it well. His clipped, descriptive sentences add much more color than you would think could be added to such a desolate setting. For example, "Holme swallowed the leached and tasteless wad of meat, his eyeballs tilting like a toad's with the effort." I was drawn into this book from the beginning.
  
  At first there seemed a general theme to Outer Dark. Many abandoned buildings in a desolate and poor countryside and yet every person they met offered them food or a place to stay. The exception being Culla Holme, who invariably seemed to be chased by bad circumstances for what he did with his incestuous child. A kind of retribution was being enacted on him.
  
  But this is where it got confusing. All of a sudden there would be a quick excerpt or scene of violence and death. You don't know why it happened or who did it, but it always happened just before or after a Culla chapter. So conclusions are drawn. We soon find out that it isn't him, that it is the villains of the novel. Culla himself runs into them several times as part of the retribution enacted for the incestuous relationship coupled with the attempted murder of his newborn son. Then the novel goes haywire and turns macabre and horror like, leaving you finishing the book not understanding anything, not understanding what the book was about. Perhaps I missed something.
  
  I am definitely intrigued with McCarthy's style of writing and I will definitely read some of his other books. And I think I would find that this is a book more for the diehard McCarthy fans than it is for someone like myself who has never read any of his other novels. I would recommend McCarthy, but not necessarily this book.
  
  3 stars.
  
  
• Swift and Dark
  By A2DN7CMU79CQMZ on 1999-07-26
  Clashing between meaness and kindness and harsh but of-its-own-grace rural south. The vernacular plucks you out of modern society and drops you in theirs where you are the vulnerable one. Intense and great.
  
  
• Peter Smith hardcover WARNING!
  By AYRPJESM22ERK on 2001-11-27
  If you're considering buying the Peter Smith "edition" of this book, note that it is NOT a new "edition" in hardcover but the Vintage International edition rebound in red cloth, with the cover of said trade paperback glued onto the front. It looks like it's been rebound for libraries, not for sale to the general public. Amazon haven't seen fit to warn you of this, alas. The book is WELL-REBOUND, and may still be worth it to you Cormac McCarthy diehards out there -- it is for me, and ultimately I'm just gonna keep the copy of it I bought, but it's still quite disappointing. Thought you deserved a warning, hope it came in time.
  
  
• I Loved It But Not Sure Why
  By A3QS5UYAGHF4IU on 2008-04-07
  I thoroughly enjoyed this book (if "enjoyed" is the right word) but I have no idea what it's about. Like all the other McCarthy books I've read, it is compelling from word one. No one today shapes the English language like McCarthy. His every word is poetry. His ear for dialog and dialect is staggering. His description of everything, I mean EVERYTHING, is unerring, uncannily so. His ability to set a (mostly) dark and somber mood is (literally) scary. But I don't know what the book was about. I guess it was about a lot of things. No matter to me: I just enjoyed reading it. I enjoyed the suspense, the symbolism, the gothic emotion, the rawness of it. I've read several McCarthy books. I was lukewarm about the Border Trilogy, but hooked after "The Road", "No Country..." and others. Wonderful, masterful book. But I still don't know what it was about....
  
  
• Compelling Read
  By A15HDH77QO9J9C on 2007-05-12
  This is a great book- almost as good as 'The Road'. I didn't want to put it down. The natual slowness doesn't hurt the urge to continue to read. If you like The Road, you will like this!
  
  
• Dark But Entertaining
  By A2ENIQZX6VJYUM on 2007-09-19
  Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode island and grew up in Tennessee, but now lives in Tesuque, New Mexico. He is viewed by many as one of the more unusual and most talented of the current American writers. For example, Harold Bloom has written a number of things about McCarthy. I selected this book after reading pretty Horses. I was interested in some of his early work.
  
  This is McCarthy's second novel published in 1970. The story is about a very poor brother and sister living in the rural south some time around 1900. The sister has a baby and the brother, Culla, does not want the baby and tells his sister it died and leaves it in the woods. The sister, Rinthy, does not believe him and sets out on a journey to find the baby. Simultaneously, Culla sets out on his own "dark" trip.
  
  McCarthy has developed trademark prose, and some might not like it. He writes long rambling sentences to describe the natural setting and between he uses spartan narrative and dialogue.
  
  The prose is complicated by design. I thought the prose was very effective in the middle of pretty Horses. He uses the same technique here but in a less developed way. He opens the book with just three sentences in one page, including one sentence 12 lines long. He reminds me a bit of the opening of Farewell to Arms where Hemingway tries to set the mood through the use of prose: Hemingway uses a narrative of the natural surroundings. McCarthy uses expressions such as "the sun sat blood red and elliptic" in his late book Pretty Horses" and here again we find the similar expression. Sometimes this prose seems out of place when compared to the spartan dialogue of a father and son talking over a breakfast of eggs and coffee.
  
  Also, in later books McCarthy uses what is called polysyndeton, or the use of several conjunctions in close succession, especially where some might be omitted. It is a stylistic scheme used to slow down the tempo. As pointed out by others, polysyndeton is used extensively in the King James Version of the Bible. For example:
  
  "And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark." Genesis 7:22-24
  
  We see a bit of that here in the early work.
  
  So, this a pretty dark novel about some poor people traveling around rural America set around 1900 or earlier. It is a short but entertaining read and gives us a picture of the young McCarthy as a writer.
  
  Recommend: 4 or 5 stars.
  
  
  
  
  
• good
  By A3VXOB7L8TXW9D on 2008-03-21
  I found Outer Dark to be the kind of novel that Faulkner would have written if he had been from Appalachia. Rife with symbolism and biblical allegory, Outer Dark takes the reader on a brother's journey to find his sister while also taking the sister on a journey in search of her baby that the brother has given away. The journey meanders past a slew of interesting characters on its way to its final outcome.
  
  The biggest problem that I had with this one was that it felt too much like McCarthy was trying to do his best Faulkner impression. This was still early in McCarthy's career, and you can see the writer drawing from one of his influences in lieu of having his own writing style. Yet, McCarthy does Faulkner as well as anyone possiblty good other than Faulkner himself, so this does not detract too much from the book. It is still a very good story that introduces the reader to some interesting characters. This one isn't quite as good as some of his later works, but it is still a good book in its own right.
  
  
• outer dark and inner dark, evil remains the same
  By A3VIOCJZ22JZXT on 2008-06-28
  McCarthy's novels are certainly not for everyone, for they are dark pessimistic interpretations of the human condition, often showing mankind at our worst. Outer Dark is exceptionally well written. The journeys of a sister and brother has many characteristics of dark folk tales and Greek drama on cosmological justice, or the lack there of. The tale evokes Greek Tragedy and Old Testiment Judgements. The story is mythlike and makes reference to concepts around Original Sin and Redemption.
  
  Because the characters are early 1900 Appalachian, there is of course a comparison and contrast to William Faulkner's work. McCarthy, like Faulkner, is a master of the English language and complex sentence structures. But McCarthy is more straight-forward and less ambiguous in his sentence structure and narrative style. McCarthy is also a master at identification of out of style, low frequency words, which he resurrects in his writing. McCarthy, like many great writers, invents words also. However he invents words with such strong reference to English language etiology that they are immediately recognizable and useful. Like Faulkner before him, McCarthy explores dark themes of human deprivation, but McCarthy actually takes these themes further than Faulkner since he explores ancient themes from the Greeks regarding fate and destiny and inescapability from the dark human condition.
  
  At the core of many novels by McCarthy is a killing machine, a dark and mysterious man who kills his fellow humans as would an earthquake or hurricane or forest fire or any other force of nature. Some critics have linked these serial killer forces of nature to Achilles in the Iliad, one of the earliest serial killer anti-heroes from literature. For Achilles, the son of a water goddess is a marvel of masculine aggression and adroit, athletic slaughter. When such a serial killer engages in murder, he has no more emotion than a tidal wave. He expects no justice or injustice for killing is like breathing. It is a personal tragedy like being killed by a falling tree or drowning in a pond. For there is no justice against the tree or the pond and McCarthy sees his murderers as beyond earthy human justice or any cosmological justice from a absent and unconcerned God. Because this natural killer is in total touch with the worst aggressive aspects of human nature, they frequently can see the darkest instincts within their fellow men.
  
  Outer Dark however also has a familiar narrative structure to the dark folk tales of Eastern Europe where children are eaten by wolves. For in this story, an 18 year old girl and her slightly older brother commit incest and the brother hides the baby in the forest telling his sister that the baby died, a story she doesn't believe for a minute. He leaves home on a quest away from his sin and deed. She leaves home on a quest for the child which has been taken by a Rumplestilkin tinker that uses terminology that evokes the anti-semitic descriptions of Jews in the Middle Ages.. Simultaneous to their parallel paths through darkness, three murderers stalk the land and seem oddly related to bringing rough reconciliation or completion to the tragedy.
  
  A Jungian interpretation of the novel is really in order also for the boy is a thief and liar in a world of thieves and liars. The girl seeks her child for 8 months and never stops lactating. This odd feature to this story may reflect the miraculous in the lives of Catholic Saints for the girl believed that as long as her breasts weep milk, that the child is still somewhere alive in the world. The boy and girl may represent two sides of the human personality and each has a path to follow toward reconciliation with the other. Underneath much of the horror is a redemption story for the innocent child he denies is the product of his sin. However the redemption is extremely dark in this tale of horror.
  
  
  
  
  
• Outer Dark reads like William Faulkner.
  By A3D9VXSUDX8J36 on 2008-09-02
  Better known for his later novels The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, the Crossing, Cities of the Plain, Blood Meridian, and No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy's second novel, Outer Dark (1968), is set in Appalachia around the turn of the twentieth century. As the title suggests, dark tones permeate the novel, along with Biblical imagery. The novel reads like William Faulkner. It is gothic, apocalyptic, poetic, and full of mystery. It tells the story of a woman, Rinthy, who gives birth to her brother Culla's baby. After leaving the newborn boy in the woods to die, Culla tells his sister the baby died of natural causes. Rinthy sets out to find her baby. Meanwhile, a tinker finds the infant in the woods. As Culla walks from town to town rather aimlessly searching for work, Rinthy attempts to locate the tinker and her baby. In his travels, Culla is wrongfully accused of theft, murder, trespassing, and inciting a herd of hogs to riot. Ultimately, both Culla and Rintha are subjected to punishment for their original sin. Though a minor work, Outer Dark reveals the literary genius of Cormac McCarthy. Recommended.
  
  G. Merritt
  
  
• brilliant, disturbing
  By A1QXUGFNCZZTV1 on 2008-09-15
  The language of this relatively short novel is beautiful and haunting. Even though McCarthy's writing style has changed a little with each book over the past 40 years, each stage along the way has its own unique brilliance, and the somewhat sparce prose of "Outer Dark" is no exception. McCarthy has an ability like no other author I've read to describe a landscape - both exterior or interior - with such startling clarity and yet with such few words. McCarthy has no need for interior monologue, excessive dialogue, or an omniscient narrator; with the slightest subtle gestures he shares intimate and profound emotions and concepts with his reader. "Outer Dark" (as well as McCarthy's other works) is brilliant in this way.
  The novel is also quite disturbing. Although they are only in a few short scenes, the mysterious trio, personifying the utter depths of (in)human violence and depravity, refuse to leave the reader's thoughts after the book has been finished. A couple of their scenes (really the only ones they appear in) left me with a very real sense of dread that didn't leave for a few days.
  The actual violence of the book only takes up a couple pages of the entire novel, but as another reviewer stated, the feeling of the entire book is one of violence and oppressive fear. Once again, this is a testimony to McCarthy's mastery of language and storytelling. Because of this, the actual violence that there is is that much more powerful. I found this book in every way as disturbing as the much longer, much more violent "Blood Meridian."
  From a literary standpoint, McCarthy's books are absolutely inspiring. His aesthetics present humanity at its basest, most fearsome state, but simultaneously shows slivers of the goodness and nobility in mankind, and maybe (I emphasize MAYBE) the hope that lays hidden beneath his horrifying portrait of existence.
  
  
  
• Cormac Junky Review
  By A2FY4H0NI517WE on 2006-01-08
  I admit it. I am hooked on McCarthy. Working thru every published thing the man has written. Just finished Outer Dark moments ago. Once you have the "break through" into his writing, (getting used to paragraph long sentences and the stunning lack of commas), you get totally and completly sucked into his world. The smells, taste, awe, the horror. Usually. I know outer dark is an early work and it is, in itself, truly amazing. At the same time, I did not find myself as transported into the story as Suttree, a work of similar nature and setting.
  
  I would recomend this book, but not as a first Cormac read. You want your socks knocked off? Read Blood Meridian. Hell, read them all....But be ready to be changed. There is no going back after McCarthy.
  
  

• Child of God
• Suttree
• The Orchard Keeper
• Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
• The Sunset Limited