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...

Having given 5* to The Road (my review here http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), I was surprised and disappointed at how much I disliked this. 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: a woman searching for her missing baby; her brother searching for her; a tinker t...

I don't think I've ever read a book I kept wanting to DNF even as I compulsively turned the pages, wanting more. On one hand, I was bored. On the other, I was enthralled. This book is dark and sinister and grisly. It's also mundane. And yet..... and yet I could not get enough of it. I think it must take some special kind of genius to do this to a reader. I think I'll remember this book for some time to come.

Hard people makes hard times. I've seen the meanness of humans till I don't know why God ain't put out the sun and gone awayLike the title suggests, this is a dark book. Culla and Rinthy Holme are brother and sister. They both have a child together and Culla leaves the baby in the woods to die without Rinthy's knowledge and tells her the baby died during the birth. A tinker comes along and takes the baby away. Rinthy realizes that Culla was lying all along and the child is alive. She sets off to...

A brother and sister make a baby together and both end up on separate life journeys soon after the birth. This was a weird story. I know it runs a lot deeper than my brain is wanting to go. I spent a lot of time backreading to determine if I had missed something written, only to discover that what I had missed was something indirect. I did consider bringing my review down to two stars because of this, but the author has a unique writing style that kept me engaged. What impressed me the most w

Video review: https://youtu.be/-t-pMoiWjUM

Of course, I loved it. To my great surprise, I discovered that I had not read this one while leafing through my paperbacks. Knowing this author, it foreshadows much of his later work, especially with the biblical themes of original sin, banishment from the garden, and the journey that our actions take us on. That journey is dangerous, often humorous, but always tinged with the innate cruelty residing in the heart of man. The two characters seem oblivious to their original error (incest), though

4.5 stars“Voices were being raised against him. He was caught up in the crowd and the stink of their rags filled his nostrils. They grew seething and more mutinous and he tried to hide among them but they knew him even in that pit of hopeless dark and fell upon him with howls of outrage.”I’m certain I just spent the past few days in purgatory. Or maybe I was sent directly to Hell. Whatever you want to call it, I was immersed in something dark, violent, and deeply disturbing. It’s the stuff of ni...

Outer Dark: Cormac McCarthy's Novel of Judgment and Responsibility And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Matthew 25:30, KJVIf there were ever a more unprofitable servant to appear in literature, it would be difficult to find one less so than Culla Holme. 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, refusin...

As far as I’m concerned there’s no other author quite like Cormac McCarthy. I’ve heard some comparisons to William Faulkner but as I’m yet to read anything by him, for now I’ll stick to my statement about McCarthy’s unique and powerful writing style. It’s not like I can say that he’s among my favourite writers because from all of the novels I’ve read by him so far, only The Road can be found among my favourites. But The Road is in a category of its own anyway so that doesn’t mean or explain much...

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...

Definitionally Southern GothicThis novel should top the list in any Google search for, or be featured in any dictionary's definition of, "Southern gothic fiction." What we have here, friends, is two odysseys through a few circles like Dante's, full of nihilistic brutality, edentulous elderly, incest, cannibalism, grim reapers and angels of death, liquor, piety, grotesquery, apocalyptic ambiguities, and Biblical allegories. You'd best wear boots when you start to readin' cuz yore fixin' to enter

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... pop...

With this story, the author shows us that two people who have been able to get closer to their being separate follow parallel paths. Finally, a lesson in ordinary life but inscribed in an unknown setting. Through the play of symbols, the story's rhythm, episodes of discoveries, we seek as characters to know the rest, the end of the journey in this universe full of dishonesty and disappointment.That's a very modern and lovely novel.

3.5/5 The ancestors had called Europeans “the orphan people” and had noted that as with orphans taken in by selfish or coldhearted clanspeople, few Europeans had remained whole. 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.-Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead I will always be a fan of McCarthy because of his treatment of the "Western" tradition. H...