Outer Dark (Vintage International) by Cormac McCarthy (EPUB)

Description

From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road • A novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother’s child, a boy; he 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.Look for Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, The Passenger.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This 1968 novel written by Cormac McCarthy is brilliant, but also one of the most disheartening stories that I’ve ever read. Warning: If you are suffering from depression, don’t even think about reading this somber book. Cormac is truly the gloom and doom master. A quote from ‘All the Pretty Horses’ sums up Mr. McCarthy’s thoughts on life:” It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.” One of Cormac’s Outer Dark quotes is:”Ive seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.” One of the two main characters, Culla states bleakness best when talking to the mysterious bearded man and says:” I never give nobody nothin, I never had nothin. Never figured nothin, never had nothin, never was nothin, the man said. He was looking at nothin at all.” I added the quote marks, but Cormac doesn’t use them, or any other basic elements of prose in his novels. If you have read any of my reviews, you know that I’m not a fan of his famous novel ‘The Road’, however I am an admirer of this novel. He has stated in the past that if the story is good enough, the author doesn’t have to be grammatically correct. I hear you loud and clear! This story will stay with me for awhile.Even though Cormac doesn’t mention a time, or place, I did some basic research and it seems that this story takes place in the Appalachia mountains of east Tennessee. I can’t find a time period, but it felt like I was reading a novel set in the early 1900s. It’s the story of a brother and sister, Culla and Rinthy, who have an incestious relationship resulting in a baby. Both of these people are destitute mountain people of low education living in a rural cabin. As Rinthy recovers from the birth, she hears a tinker ( a travelling seller of pots and pans ) outside talking to her brother. The tinker leaves, and while Rinthy sleeps, Culla goes in the woods and leaves the baby in the glade to die. When Culla goes home, he chops a fake grave with his axe. The tinker, in his travels, finds the baby. When Rinthy wakes, Culla says the baby died. She discovers that the grave is fake and thinking that her brother sold her baby to the tinker, she leaves on foot pursuing the tinker. Culla also leaves on foot seemingly looking for his sister, but more likely because he is fleeing from his sins and just wants to get away. To complicate matters for Culla, three mysterious men apparently follow Culla causing death and mayhem in his wake. Rinthy, in her travels, finds people mostly accommodating to her plight. Culla, Rinthy, the baby, the tinker, and the three mysterious men are heading for a collision of monumental and unguessable fruition. You must read this precocious second novel by Cormac McCarthy, it is stunning.I find this story full of symbolism and metaphors. For instance, Culla and the three mysterious men seem to have nothing in common. But why do the three men appear to follow Culla from town to town, causing Culla many troubles. The leader of the men wears black, which is a symbol of evil and death. Culla seems to be running from his sins and the three men are in pursuit to mete out punishment. Evil looms all around Culla. Are the three men emissaries of the devil? Rinthy, on the other hand, receives food and shelter from most of the people she meets on her quest to find her baby. Are these people representing the Archangels of God? I don’t know, but I do know when I’m reading a book full of symbolism. And what about the mean tinker? Who does he portray? And finally, who is the blind man Culla meets at the end of the novel who says:”But I knowed I’d seen ye afore.” Culla wants to know if the blind man is a preacher, and the blind man says:”No. No preacher. What is they to preach? It’s all plain enough. Word and flesh. I don’t hold much with preachin.”Is this the Grim Reaper, now hot on Culla’s trail? I don’t know, but it’s fun conjecturing on a Cormac McCarthy novel.

⭐I recently read The Road which was a great and mesmerising book. This book started out with many of the same qualities – bleak hopeless lifestyle, random characters, extreme poverty and desperate survival. But about 3/4 through the book I started to get a sneaking suspicion that nothing was ever going to develop or wrap up. I found myself stuck in a loop of characters wandering around, bungling and not really accomplishing anything. A lot of the scenes seemed pointless and the timeline was confusing. And then the book just ends very abruptly, leaving me wondering why I had just devoted a week to reading it.Don’t get me wrong, the book does have redeeming qualities in the writing style, etc. Hence the 3 stars. It was not the worst book I ever read. But the distinct lack of a plot, any character development, or the sense of anything coming full circle is very dissapointing for a reader. Unless the point of this book was just to be a slice of life depicting these impoverished, uneducated characters wandering their way through their bleak and pointless lives. There are 3 villans in the book, but they seem purposeless. The Road was also about characters wandering a bleak landscape with no real purpose other than survival, but the story was more cohesive and the theme of survival more poignant. The villans were more varied and their violence more understandable.Another senseless annoyance in this book was the lack of quotation marks when a character spoke, as well as all characters being referred to with the same “he” or “she” at the beginning of every new scene. You find yourself straining to realize which character is being discussed. Perhaps this technique has some “purpose” or symbolism but as a reader I just found it annoying and felt that it detracted from the book.All in all, as I said, the book was not terrible. I definately did find myself sucked into this world, with very vivid visuals of all the characters and landscapes. I feel that the descriptions of how life in this area in this time must have been seemed very realistic. And something about the writer’s style really appeals to me. As I said, I loved The Road, did not love this book and though the movie for “No Country For Old Men” was downright unwatchable (I realize it is unfair to judge the author on a movie adaptation, but I will NEVER read that book). So Cormac McCarthy is only 1 for 2 with me, but something keeps me coming back. I just finished Outer Dark and I am about to purchase Child of God on my Kindle.I would say, don’t let this be your first introduction to Cormac McCarthy. You may find it confusing and off-putting. Try The Road first, it is overall a much better book.

⭐Great read!

⭐McCarthy makes up words and uses seldom used words which is all wholly unnecessary. He is likely my absolute favorite author but he could be equally effective without being so complicated. Some passages are torture for me !

⭐It is impossible to describe what attracts me, it must be the realism of the feeling. Many of the most harrowing aspects are inferred as opposed to being graphic, however the situations are such that you feel the fallout in the pit of your stomach just as if you had been there. It often takes time to recover after reading a few chapters, and can take months for the feeling left after the book to subside completely.It is a concern to me now that I don’t get anything like the intensity of reading experience from any other author, and I have run out of McCarthy books. I think the books should come with a warning, it is not that you like these stories they are often harrowing, but it is always incredible when you realize where you have been transported, and despite the incredible descriptive prose it is often what is not said but still there that takes you there. Enough, amazing!

⭐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 Meridian.None of the above is meant to say that these books are not great….they are.Like many,I got into Cormac after the films No Country For Old Men and The Road.I should have got into him a lot earlier.His writing style is majestic and poetic,maybe even hypnotic.I have just completed the Border Trilogy and can only praise that also.A bit exhausting,though.But worthwhile.More than….sorry,trying unsuccessfully to write like him.Back to Outer Dark.I cried at the end of this.I have never done that before.I cried at the storyline,I cried for the sister and brother,I cried at how much better a writer he is than I will ever be.

⭐My first book by the author having watched some films based on his novels and I do seem to have missed the genius that other readers have got. The book to me is just a series of scenes each of which are fine in themselves, but there just doesn’t seem to be that much of a point. There isn’t any twists, there isn’t really any change in pace or anything else. Now I guess that maybe the point and the author is revelling in the bleakness of the setting but it felt at times as if it was a chore to pick up and read a chapter or two.I’ve been given another one of his books to read and will give it a go as I would like to experience what other readers have but maybe this will be an author I just don’t ‘get’.

⭐Anyone who can write the following paragraph has to be worth reading. Staggeringly good:What discordant vespers do the tinker’s goods chime through the long twilight and over the brindled forest road, him stooped and hounded through the windy recrements of day like those old exiles who divorced of corporeality and enjoined ingress of heaven or hell wander forever the middle warrens spoorless increate and anathema. Hounded by grief, by guilt, or like this cheerless vendor clamored at heel through wood and fen by his own querulous and inconsolable wares in perennial tin malediction.

⭐Just finished it today, and gotta say what a fantastic story. Some really gripping moments in this book, I especially liked the way it kept going from the brothers journey, to the sisters one. Ive read The road ( about 10 times, as I love it ) No country for old men, Child of god and Blood meridian.Think now I shall purchase his first novel, The orchard keeper.Brilliant AuthorSam

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