When it comes to Southern Gothic novels, I don’t think it gets much more nihilistic than Child of God. When you consider that the genre boasts such cynical and sinister-minded individuals as Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Erskine Caldwell, that’s no minor feat.

At less than three hundred pages, Child is a reasonably short novel, but what a blast in the face it is. Like most books in the genre, it builds its tale around the doings of a grotesque and barely believable character (in this case, a mental deficient named Lester Ballard), but unlike its literary fellows, it depends less on pacing and character development than on presenting a string of atrocities to horrify the reader.

Cormac’s writing style here is simple, terse, and informal, eschewing even quotation marks. Conversations between the characters are about as low-brow as you’d expect from rednecks living in the hills of Tennessee. Cormac’s sense of description is vivid enough, but he doesn’t bog the plot down with too many flowery visuals. Nor does he really go much into the whys and wherefores of the events at hand- things just happen and we the readers are left to sort them out.

The main characteristics of Child would have to be the unresolved ending (not uncommon in Southern Gothic literature), the apparent lack of any clear message (at least, any that I could catch), and especially, the scenes of horror. You get arson, murder, necrophilia, rape (including a hideous one involving a father and his daughter), a flood, and the usual eccentric plot devices that I can’t really go into without giving away too much.

The symbolism is pretty powerful, specifically that of the cave in which Lester resides after burning his house to the ground. The themes of degeneration, escape, and divine chastisement are easy to identify, but what McCarthy was hoping to accomplish beyond that is anybody’s guess. The tendency of Southern writers to make their characters sympathetic is barely achieved here, since Ballard is presented as little more than a murderous ogre, albeit one that was pushed over the edge.

I would most definitely recommend this book, though it’s like reading a true crime account. It’s shocking, disgusting, and bleak, with little in the way of a moral, but it’s bound to please those who feel that Faulkner or Carson McCullers spend too much time leading up to the deed and very little beating the reader over the head with it. You can feel the hand of Faulkner guiding the proceedings (and McCarthy has apparently never disguised his admiration), but this plays out just as much like a Wes Craven take on "Deliverance".


Recommended: Yes