Outer Dark

Classics Review: Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

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In those first few sentences we know that Culla has been avoiding the inevitable. Somehow he appears to have hoped this baby would never be born, that time would stop and not allow the consequences of his shame take flesh. So, while Rinthy naps exhausted on the bed, Culla takes the child out in a storm to find a secret place to abandon it. It is raining harder and harder, with lightning flashing all around, and Culla seems to be running in circles until he finally rushes into a glade. When he crashed into the glade among the cottonwoods he fell headlong and lay there with his cheek to the earth.

The image of that child shouting at the storm is the powerful way McCarthy ends this first short chapter.

What remains after that powerful opener is something quite different. The book becomes a road fable, reminding me at times of The Odyssey. After Rinthy discovers that Culla lied about the natural death of their child, Culla leaves to find work and Rinthy leaves to find the child. As they wander they run into a host of individuals, some very good, some bad, and three particularly evil.

Throughout the novel, beginning with that strange itallicized introduction, we see these three malicious men have their way with the region in which Culla and Rinthy wander. He does this with some of his key techniques. As is the case in most of his books, there is an element of play in the evil. Here is what we encounter in Outer Dark:. He removed his hands from his pockets, locked his fingers and pushed them out before him until the knuckles cracked, raised them over his head and gripped the back of his neck with them. She looked up at a sky heavy and starless above them and laden with the false warmth of impending storm.

Now it is that, he said. He was looking all about him as if to see was it darker in some places than in others. And me standin right here. Hard people makes hard times. At other the pace slackened and it became, in its meandering, a little boring. This went on for only a few pages at a time, and perhaps they were great pages, but I was always wanting the next scene. We get enough food for thought and beauty of language in small doses like this:. Late in the day the road brought him into a swamp.

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And that was all. Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned. He tried his foot in the mire before him and it rose in a vulvate welt claggy and sucking. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place. I enjoy getting Mooksed and Gripsed because we have similar literary tastes.

Good stuff, Outer Dark is. One of my favorite McC. Thanks for sharing your take. Colleen, what McCarthy book set you off the track? I know a few people who only like his early novels. At any rate, his second and third novels certainly caused me to react in ways no other books have. The Road did the same thing, but in a much different way — the fatherhood angle, and all. Kevin from California, thanks for the comment and for turning my blog name into a verb: I agree about our tastes being quite similar.

Through a chance encounter, two men of opposing ideologies deliberate spiritual, philosophical, and profound matters in a New York apartment. In a dangerous post-apocalyptic world, an ailing father defends his son as they slowly travel to the sea. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the s, Blood Meridian traces the journey of the Kid, a 14 year old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish A woman bears her brothers child and as soon as the child is born, the man takes the child out in the woods to leave for it to die.

As soon as the woman finds out it is a lie, she sets of to find the child. But she has no idea what lies ahead of her adventure to save her child. Start your free trial. Find showtimes, watch trailers, browse photos, track your Watchlist and rate your favorite movies and TV shows on your phone or tablet! Enjoy unlimited streaming on Prime Video.

There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Full Cast and Crew. As soon as the woman finds out it is a lie, she sets of Stephen Imwalle adaptation , Cormac McCarthy novel. Return to Book Page. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy, the brother 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 through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying strangers, toward an apocalyptic resolution. Paperback , pages. Culla Holme , Rinthy Holme. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Outer Dark , please sign up. Lists with This Book. May 17, Annet rated it really liked it Shelves: This is my third Cormac McCarthy book. First one was The Road, which is without a doubt one of the best books I ever read, it had a great impact on me.

Second was No country for old men, after seeing the movie and discovering this story was also written by McCarthy I felt the need to read the story too to fully grasp its meanings. McCarthy writes dark, incredible, fascinating stories, Outer Dark is no exception. I find his writing and style very powerful, very expressive, beautiful, clear senten This is my third Cormac McCarthy book. I find his writing and style very powerful, very expressive, beautiful, clear sentences, language and descriptions and the stories are so fascinating and always food for thought, I am a big fan of Cormac McCarthy now.

This book leaves you thinking I'm sure I will want to keep rereading his books. This man is a great writer. So glad I discovered his talents last year with The Road. Next McCarthy book is on my list to read, but after a break and some other books. This book has to sink in first and first I need some lighter reads before starting the next one. However, looking forward to it already. View all 21 comments. Aug 23, Mike Puma rated it really liked it Shelves: View all 61 comments.

Jun 03, Tom Troutman rated it it was amazing. View all 8 comments. Like The Road, it is dark and sparse, and involves destitute people travelling on foot, looking for food, shelter and hope, but that is where the similarity ends. This is set much longer ago before cars and tells several parallel and occasionally intersecting stories: Although they all rely on, and often receive kindness from strangers, the book is suffused with brooding menace: Like The Road, the language is bleak and McCarthy doesn't scatter the pages with punctuation, though he uses far more than in The Road: Whereas I think that extreme sparseness worked in The Road, the middle path adopted in this book is neither one thing nor the other.

I never found the story really engaging, but my real problem with it is the gruesomeness. There is a vicious, motiveless murder, done with a smile. Nasty, but in context, it fits with the story. However, near the end there is something much worse that I wish I hadn't read. Not for the faint-hearted. View all 29 comments.

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Not for the squeamish. Brother to Rinthy, he has perpetrated the social taboo of incest. He fears his sin will be found out. When Rinthy's water breaks, he allows her to suffer through labor, refusing t Outer Dark: When Rinthy's water breaks, he allows her to suffer through labor, refusing to even summon a midwife.

She bears a son, whom Culla never allows her to hold or nurse. Rather, he abandons his child in the woods and tells his sister the child has died. A travelling tinker finds the child and saves it. To hide his abandonment of the child, Culla prepares a grave, a deception Rinthy sees through, digging up the grave herself to find that no body is there.

Culla leaves their home and seeks work from town to town. Rinthy also leaves home to find her child, her "Chap," as she calls him. Each of Culla's efforts to find work and become a profitable servant fail. He is pursued by three violent men, perhaps symbols of an angry God, who leave a path of death and destruction in their wake.

I wondered that there were not four horsemen. But I remembered that McCarthy was the fourth, driving each of the three on and on. The targets of their violence are those with whom Culla has come into contact. The simple honesty of Rinthy brings her into contact with individuals of a kinder and gentler nature than those with whom Culla deals and deceives. That Culla ultimately is confronted by the vengeful trio is inevitable. I leave the outcome of Culla's judgment to the readerm just as must also leave the outcome of Rinthy's search for her Chap.

McCarthy's second novel descends into darkness of a degree much greater than seen in his debut novel, The Orchard Keeper. With this novel, the reader sees McCarthy's escalating violence that is vivid in its ability to shock and appall. This is a tale that might have been ripped from the pages of the Brothers Grimm and ramped up to a degree that is sufficiently shocking for a society that has become more jaded and unable to wince at the vilest acts of men. It will not easily be forgotten, once read.

Nor is it a tale one will easily pick up again. View all 5 comments. An air of ruin permeates this bleak tale of abandonment, desperation, and want. They ain't never had nuthin'. Look for a man who bares 'his orangecolored teeth in a grimace of lecherous idiocy.

See the old crone with the elfin face in the woods. She won't abide a hound dog on the place, but has no qualms with a pig rooting around and sleep An air of ruin permeates this bleak tale of abandonment, desperation, and want. She won't abide a hound dog on the place, but has no qualms with a pig rooting around and sleeping inside her shack. For readers who dig on desolate, unforgiving plots, this one's for you. I thought it was outstanding. View all 4 comments. Apr 26, EisNinE rated it it was amazing Shelves: From his earliest literary forays like 'The Orchard Keeper' and 'Suttree', it was clear that the American Novel had found its heir to Faulkner.

His prose contained the same lyrical beauty and biblical gravity of his artistic predecessor, but with a harsh, often brutal clarity that was all his own. With 'Outer Dark', he transcended the labels and comparisons, defining himself as the greatest prose stylist of his generation, framing the rough structure for his dark personal vision of America As American as this novel is, McCarthy mines deeper veins, working mythological ores seamlessly into the alloy.

The baby left exposed on a hillside due to deformity or weakness, or as in this case, incest, is drawn from the Bronze Age traditions of ancient Greece, wherein the gods decide the child's fate. The terrifying and brilliant presence of the three deadly strangers stalking the siblings' trail are the Erinyes, The Furies, agents of divine retribution tasked with hounding and destroying those who spill the blood of their own family. The allusions continue, and a knowledge of Greek myth is certainly helpful in fully appreciating the depth of the novel, but isn't necessary.

McCarthy draws upon archetypal resonance to give 'Outer Dark' a weight that transcends the particulars of time and place without in any way negating them. It's not his greatest novel, but it was his first true masterpiece. They failed to recognize the earth was their mother. Europeans were like their first parents, Adam and Eve, wandering aimlessly because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned them. However, my rating is part comparison to his previously read works, part comparison to previously read as a whole, due to my growing intolerance for gore porn.

Chances are good that, had I not read Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West previous to this, the rating would have been higher. This not being the case, coupled with the climatic overload of view spoiler [gruesome baby murder hide spoiler ] having been hit upon recently in a much stronger fashion by God's Bits of Wood , renders the stars as shown. And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird's first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare.

Another reason for the not quite 'really liked it' is my quota of McCarthytasmagoric prose remaining unfulfilled by the end of the book. This is his first or thereabouts, if I remember correctly, which may explain the beginning of the text flashing out in cthulu glory only to die down and save for a couple brief surges never regaining its sermon of pungent damnation. Few can match the prose of an everlasting stumbling out of the utter darkness into a world of inexorable senses, so if you're looking for a McCarthy intro less inundated by public praise, this would be a good place to start.

As you maybe can tell from my own five-dollar word ramblings, his writing style is an infectious breed. I believe I would've liked it more if the themes had tended less towards the biblical parsings of Original Sin and more towards what it really means for a country to instill an overwhelming desire in all its citizens to go out alone and make as violent and crazed a living as is necessary for their "independence". Or maybe it was McCarthy's insistence on fleshing out the prolicidal male of the incestuous couple when the author's strengths lie neither in empathy nor in resonance but in fearful archetype of what we worship and cower amongst.

I'm banking on Suttree to go better than this one did, so here's hoping that pops up at a sale in the coming weeks. View all 12 comments.

Outer Dark

May 05, Diane Barnes rated it it was amazing Shelves: I wasn't sure about this book. I read "All the Pretty Horses" many years ago and didn't care for it. I tried "Suttree" and put it down after a couple of chapters. I liked "The Orchard Keeper", but it wasn't his typical dark, dark themes. But maybe this one came along at just the right time in my evolution as a reader. Despite the violence and sadness, despite the intentionally evil actions of some and the wrong actions of others that were committed in innocence, this book became for me an allegor I wasn't sure about this book.

Despite the violence and sadness, despite the intentionally evil actions of some and the wrong actions of others that were committed in innocence, this book became for me an allegory of our journey through life.

I've seen the meanness of humans til I don't know why God ain't put out the sun and gone away. His writing is on a different plane of consciousness and transports me to that plane as I am reading. And his mastery of dialogue is pure genius. He leaves a lot of decisions about his characters up to the reader, which I appreciate.

I like it when an author thinks I'm intelligent enough to figure it out. There is a scene near the end of this book where Holme, one of the main characters, meets up with a group of men driving a herd of hogs to market. It is a comic masterpiece, placed in exactly the right spot to make the horror in the next chapter even more awful. McCarthy doesn't like one to get too comfortable. So, to surprise a lot of people, myself most of all, I am now a full-fledged McCarthy fan. After an interval, of course. His words are too powerful, and need to be rationed out.

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