books:

	Outer Dark Cormac Mccarthy Vintage, 1993 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 33 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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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Conveying without saying

What most impressed me about this novel was that so many things could be conveyed without even being described. In many scenes, one somehow knows what has happened even though McCarthy has never actually told us so. There are some brilliant examples of communication through suggestion. Here is one example: Near the beginning of the novel we find some horrific descriptions of violence and gore. This primes us to expect more. But for the rest of the novel, the violence and gore are never really stated but only hinted. But after this priming, hints are even better than statements. The hints make the imagination run wild, and turn out to be even more effective than explicit statements. After the early explicit scenes, we are ready to jump or cry at any hint. And I do mean "cry". This is not simply a horror story. There is something heartwrenching about it. I also want to point out that some of the reviewers are mistaken in calling this novel a "western". The way the characters speak is clearly Appalachian.

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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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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.


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

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