A wellcrafted consistent lyrical trek thru a Hell of sorts

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	• Outer Dark Cormac Mccarthy Vintage, 1993 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 31 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Western redone as gothic horror

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.

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Swift and Dark

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.

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A Tale of Darkness and Descent

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.

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A wellcrafted consistent lyrical trek thru a Hell of sorts

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."

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Appalachian Painted Bird

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.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, page 6, 7

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