Cormac McCarthy /// Outer Dark
After reading McCarthy’s two latest novels (The Road, No Country For Old Men) and the middle-period masterpiece (Blood Meridian), the time seemed ripe for a foray into the early years. And what a relief it was—not the book, which is as heart-turningly black as the title suggests, but the fact that McCarthy’s obsessions with indelible sin and spectacular death have been with him all his life and are not merely the symptom of advanced age. The incestuously bound and geographically divided Culla and Rinthy Holme of Outer Dark wander a surreal Appalachia teeming with unchecked power: in their episodic encounters with countryside folk we can never forget that each stranger might see fit to kill or save, condemn or absolve, with only their own conscience to judge them in the aftermath. The mechanics of plot take a backseat to the strange chemistry of a turn-of-the-century state of nature, allowing McCarthy to insert his treasured archetype: the allegorical, transhuman angel of death. Readers familiar with No Country’s Anton Chigurh and Blood Meridian’s Judge will instantly recognize the preternaturally lucid, Old Testament-level force behind the homicidal trio stalking brother and sister in these pages, beautifully cut in McCarthy’s gothically sculpted prose. They are similarly seductive and withholding and able to maintain a God’s-eye-view that, disturbingly enough, turns them into sheer predators and philosophical cannibals. But more than just chilling with their stylized malevolence, these characters, throughout all of McCarthy’s books, reinforce a genius element of The Road, a sort of anti-novel about journeys to nowhere. Where isolated angels of death once roamed, the apocalypse breeds numberless such wraiths, leaving only one true innocent in the world. To invert his usual balance of good and evil is as sublime and terrifying conceit as McCarthy has ever indulged.
