Recommended if you like: Cormac McCarthy; True crime's extreme serial killers, particularly Ed Gein; I don't even know how to recommend this one otherwise

Avoid if you dislike: All manners of (CW)

sexual violence

; Depravity; Extreme misogyny; Casual racism; Animal cruelty; Claustrophobia; Minimal punctuation (most notably, a lack of quotation marks)

Woof.

I suppose I'm thankful Cormac McCarthy didn't commit to three- to four-hundred pages like he did with Blood Meridian. I'm not sure I would've been able to get through Child of God otherwise. The former is a marathon while the latter is a sprint, but both races lead through pitch black wilds of the human soul and the most depraved scenes I've seen a publishing company lend ink and paper to print.

This novel really is a testament to McCarthy's sparse, poetic prose and masterful storytelling. There are few others who could handle the despicable subject matter of this novel without falling into the dismissible "edgelord" category and derision (see: reviews for James Franco's 2013 A Child of God adaptation). McCarthy sculpts scenes like few others can, painting beautiful tableaus of nature and violence and occasionally throwing in one of the most striking and breathtaking turns of phrase that you've never seen before.

A few of my favorites below with spoiler tags in case you'd like to experience them fresh for yourself:

Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them.

Coming up the mountain through the blue winter twilight among great boulders and the ruins of giant trees prone in the forest he wondered at such upheaval. Disorder in the woods, trees down, new paths needed. Given charge Ballard would have made things more orderly in the woods and in men's souls.

He cast about among the stars for some kind of guidance but the heavens wore a different look that Ballard did not trust.

Ballard lying on his pallet by the fire one evening saw [bats] come from the dark of the tunnel and ascend through the hole overhead fluttering wildly in the ash and smoke like souls rising from hades. When they were gone he watched the hordes of cold stars sprawled across the smokehole and wondered what stuff they were made of, or himself.

Of course, anyone who's read McCarthy also knows the sudden brutality interspersed between these beautiful passages. There's nothing held back here. That said, he does have a way of describing horrific scenes as matter-of-fact, accomplishing so much with so few words that he doesn't need to over-describe or revel in the grotesquerie. It works to Child of God's favor, since I don't know that I have the fortitude to read the sort of extreme content covered in this novel if it overstayed its welcome.

Child of God stares down the most obscene and reprehensible darkness of humanity with a bravery that few authors can summon. It shines a light in the purposefully overlooked crevices of a man's mind and pulls out the most disgusting vermin for examination. Suffice to say, this book is not for most. I wouldn't even be surprised to learn that most fans of McCarthy don't enjoy this one. But McCarthy has a deft way of presenting such bleak and disturbing material, weaving a surprising benevolence and tolerance into the human condition.

An endurance test of a book. 

It is taut, it is dark, and it demands your attention. Male violence and depravity is at the core of Child of God. It is an unflinching gaze upon Lester Ballard, a rapist-murderer who exists out on the fringes of society. We witness his fall from village idiot to the specter haunting Appalachian Tennessee. He dresses in the attire of his female victims, who are not people to him and deserve no dignity even after death (as he rapes their corpses). 

The book would be better to me if I was not aware of and surrounded by the kind of violence McCarthy’s book centers around. I am not interested in the psychology of the violent male. I am not interested in “feeling bad” for this man. I see reviews saying they identified with Ballard at least for a bit. I find it hard to find myself in him, the violent figure every woman is warned to watch out for and scolded if she thinks too heavily on why she must be wary. 

Ballard is angry and violent. His psychology is “I hate women”. It’s not that deep nor is it that interesting. I would rather hear from the women he brutalizes. The women around town, the women who knew them. I want to know how they conceptualized this manifestation of male violence we are all so aware of and how they coped, especially when the men unwittingly

set Lester loose in the cave.

 

The prose is beautiful and McCormac is a gifted writer, so I will probably check out his other works.