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.