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.

I struggled very hard with this book, and my discomfort with its visceral content was only amplified when I read the recent exposé on McCarthy’s grooming of a minor during his life. It made the detachment from emotionality in this book far too real, and I won’t be continuing. 

An endurance test of a book. 

Darkly humorous at times, but a bleak, unflinching look into the deepest depths of the human soul. Each page is dripping with brutality and McCarthy’s prose is like the moonlight poking through the treetops to reveal an image. 

I would call McCarthy’s prose poetic or beautiful, but I feel that would be doing a disservice to his skill as a writer. He manages to weave these quick burst sentences with longer (and and and), meticulously constructed prose that feels completely unique. I think the thing that sets McCarthy’s prose apart from other heavily visual authors (besides his sparse use of punctuation) is how he utilizes the more flowery language. He writes some of the most beautiful sentences you’ve ever read, but it always adds another layer to the scene. There is never a moment where the level of detail he provides hurts the formation of an image in your mind. Some authors add more detail to their prose specifically because they want their prose to feel vivid rather than be vivid, and you end up scratching your head trying to figure out what they’re saying. McCarthy adds detail because it’s necessary. 

It’s an oddly structured book because the first part has a little bit of a continuous narrative with Lester finding a cabin and building his life. However, most of the pages are spent with other characters or spent listening to another character’s view of the world or Lester’s past. It’s all a somewhat loose set of anecdotes that serve mostly as depth building for Lester or the world around him. The second part, on the other hand, is pretty much only focused on Lester’s isolation and violent behavior. This part of the book is much more of a normal narrative structure without much coverage of other characters.

Lester, as a main character, is a bit empty and perhaps underdeveloped. There’s some development of his past life added, but he’s mostly a rather emotionless, frightening man. However, as a subject to study, Lester is fascinating. His slow build from false accusation to necrophilia to murder is expertly crafted and shocking at every turn. Even in a book that doesn’t avoid any of the more vivid, gruesome details, it’s still a shock whenever Lester decides to take his violent actions a little further. 

Overall, even if you fail to connect with Lester’s story or the world around him, McCarthy’s prose is so vivid, so compelling, and so unique that I think anybody with a love of language would come away feeling like they just smoked a cigarette after a night of sex. A master of prose.