- Paperback: 256 pages
- Publisher: Picador; 3 edition (3 Aug 2007)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330314920
- ISBN-13: 978-0330314923
- Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.8 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 330,190 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Outer Dark
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
A grand fable of love and loss from one of America’s finest and most celebrated authors
Book Description
By the author of the critically acclaimed Border Trilogy, Outer Dark is a novel at once mythic and starkly evocative, set in an unspecified place in Appalachia sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother’s child, a boy; the brother leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother’s lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution. ‘McCarthy is a master stylist, perhaps without equal in American letters . . . In his hands, everything is done with consummate skill’ Village Voice ‘McCarthy has made the fabulous real, the ordinary mysterious’ New York Times ‘A profound parable that ultimately speaks to any society in any time’ Time
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
39 of 40 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Outer Dark, Cormac McCarthy's second novel, is an apocalyptic and disturbing story revolving around the separate journey's made by its two protagonists. The book opens with Rinthy Holme baring her brother, Culla's, child. Not wanting the baby Culla leaves it in the woods to die where it is rescued by a tinker. On discovery of this Rinthy sets out to find her child, while Culla embarks on his own ambiguous quest. McCarthy's brilliant novel blurs the line between reality and fantasy, creating some characters who are painfully real and other who seem to have descended straight from hell, itself. The book is full of superb dialogue that is both full of wit and menace, bringing it's characters vividly to life. However despite the humour the novel is shot through with foreboding, and the closer you get to the end the more distant a happy ending becomes. The climax is both shocking and disturbing, and will anger as many as it fascinates. But throughout McCarthy proves, once again, that nobody writes better about difficult rural life and its people. Outer Dark is challenging and bleak. But like all of McCarthy's novels it rewards your time and patience.
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is the second Cormac McCarthy book I've read, my first being "The Road", which I felt to be a pretty bleak piece, though no less rewarding for that. I enjoyed it enough to try another, and picked "Outer Dark" pretty much at random. Within the first few paragraphs, this book had me completely hooked. The story is a very simple one, employing few (if any) plot complexities to keep the reader interested. Instead, it's the rich portrayal of the protagonists, a varied and fascinating cast of supporting characters, and a darkly evocative "Southern Gothic" setting that keep you utterly transfixed and eager for more. Constant throughout is a carefully balanced sense of foreboding which underpins the story as it builds to its somewhat predictable yet devastating conclusion. This is, without a doubt, the best book I have read in the last 20 years, prompting me to order every other work by this highly talented author! If each of them is half as good as "Outer Dark", I have many hours of wonderful reading ahead!
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Outer Dark does exactly that - it reaches into the dark spaces on the edge of the reach of light and interleaves fantasy into a story set in the Apalachian Mountains at a time when the trappings of existence are pared to the bone and the characters exist on the very edges of life. Cormack McCarthy writes with energy and conviction, absorbing the reader in a story that is outside his experience in a terrible landscape. The writing is as compact and as barren as the landscape and the era it describes. It is a disturbing tale which tells of a mother's search for her lost child. This becomes the only thing that matters to her and which means that she is willing to endure any amount of hardship in the quest for a child she believed to have died. Not for the fainthearted.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A dazzling master class in the art of the novelist...
I thought that 'Outer Dark' was like a cross between 'The Road' and 'Blood meridian', although to be fair it wasn't nearly as violent as 'Blood meridian' but there was nonetheless... Read more
Published 15 days ago by G. E. Harrison
A harrowing journey
Outer Dark is a road story. It's about characters walking from one place to another down dark country paths and through wilderness. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Jack Heslop
Shocking
This is more a review of all Cormac Mcarthy's work.
I found Outer Dark a very shocking book,on a parallel with the awful Child of God and,probably,the extremely violent Blood... Read more
I found Outer Dark a very shocking book,on a parallel with the awful Child of God and,probably,the extremely violent Blood... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Mr. Colin Rankin
Astonishing
A mythic journey through the darkness of the American South, this novel captures the arctypal rhythm of a country where songs and stories are wedded in blood. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Bethany Pope
Really didn't enjoy it
The only Cormac McCarthy book i had read previously was the road. This book is one of my favorites so I had very high expectations for Outer Dark. Read more
Published 13 months ago by TK79
Typical Mcarthy
Where do I start?....
This is Cormacs second novel and starts as dark as it continues. A brother and sister father a child. Read more
This is Cormacs second novel and starts as dark as it continues. A brother and sister father a child. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Bridgey
The most disturbing novel I have ever read, without question.
And the strangest. Cormac McCarthy takes apart the storytelling formula and rearranges it to his own muse.
First off, no speech marks. How often does that happen? Read more
First off, no speech marks. How often does that happen? Read more
Published 18 months ago by Max Watt
I see a darkness
Typically dark, typically bleak. If you've read any other cormac mccarthy, there's nothing amazingly innovative going on here, with similarities to the road and blood meridian, the... Read more
Published 20 months ago by Mr. J. A. F. Turner
Bleak, terrible, ferocious...
There is little you can say about Cormac McCarthy. He is a truly unique writer. He spares us nothing, and in a book like 'Outer Dark' you feel the utter sense of despair... Read more
Published on 4 May 2010 by Nicodemus Jones
Dark,bleak and brilliant
A truly memorable book in typical Cormac McCarthy style, a tale of a brother's journey in pursuit of his sister who in turn is searching for her baby. Read more
Published on 8 April 2010 by Mr. P. Hughes
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