Outer Dark

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.


A gripping, taught, harrowing read   January 24, 2008
DanD
5 out of 5 found this review helpful

A sister gives birth to her brother's child. The brother takes the infant into the woods, where it is found by a travelling salesman. When the girl finds out about her brother's deception, she heads out to find the salesman, as her brother heads out to find her. All the while, they are pursued by three murderous, mysterious strangers, hellbent on an agenda all their own.

There's a lot in "Outer Dark" that is just plain confusing; I'm still not entirely sure who leaves home first, the sister or the brother, or even the brother's reason for leaving. It doesn't matter, though; this novel isn't supposed to be an easy read. No McCarthy novel is. It's supposed to be an HONEST read--and it certainly is that. So honest you will sometimes wince; the cannibalism scene, while never fully stated, is still so disturbing you'll cringe in disgust and fear as you read. And the final scene around the fire...well, I won't go into more, for fear of spoiling it for you. Save it to say that this one will cause you some nightmares; hopefully, it'll get you thinking about your own life as well. What would you do for the ones you love? What would you do for yourself?


Step Outside   November 6, 2003
Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA)
16 out of 17 found this review helpful

This book serves as a perfect introduction to McCarthy's greatest works, particularly Blood Meridian and Suttree. In reading this relatively short work, one gains a sense of what it is like to step into a McCarthy landscape. For reading his works is more like entering some preternatural world than following your typical plot and glimpsing into depths of an individual character. Indeed, it is more like walking straight into some sort of warped medieval landscape, as a picture by Bosch or Breughel, than reading a narrative or following a plot line. One gradually finds one's self engulfed in a visionary realm with tentacles only thinly attached to a "realistic" one. And, as indicated by the title, this world is unremittingly bleak. And this work, like all McCarthy's best, leaves us pondering anew the same question: Why, for what purpose, is man thrown into this nightmare of a world? Or, as McCarthy puts it here, "He wondered where the blind man was going and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way."


outer dark and inner dark, evil remains the same   June 28, 2008
C. B Collins Jr. (Atlanta, GA United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

McCarthy's novels are certainly not for everyone, for they are dark pessimistic interpretations of the human condition, often showing mankind at our worst. Outer Dark is exceptionally well written. The journeys of a sister and brother has many characteristics of dark folk tales and Greek drama on cosmological justice, or the lack there of. The tale evokes Greek Tragedy and Old Testiment Judgements. The story is mythlike and makes reference to concepts around Original Sin and Redemption.

Because the characters are early 1900 Appalachian, there is of course a comparison and contrast to William Faulkner's work. McCarthy, like Faulkner, is a master of the English language and complex sentence structures. But McCarthy is more straight-forward and less ambiguous in his sentence structure and narrative style. McCarthy is also a master at identification of out of style, low frequency words, which he resurrects in his writing. McCarthy, like many great writers, invents words also. However he invents words with such strong reference to English language etiology that they are immediately recognizable and useful. Like Faulkner before him, McCarthy explores dark themes of human deprivation, but McCarthy actually takes these themes further than Faulkner since he explores ancient themes from the Greeks regarding fate and destiny and inescapability from the dark human condition.

At the core of many novels by McCarthy is a killing machine, a dark and mysterious man who kills his fellow humans as would an earthquake or hurricane or forest fire or any other force of nature. Some critics have linked these serial killer forces of nature to Achilles in the Iliad, one of the earliest serial killer anti-heroes from literature. For Achilles, the son of a water goddess is a marvel of masculine aggression and adroit, athletic slaughter. When such a serial killer engages in murder, he has no more emotion than a tidal wave. He expects no justice or injustice for killing is like breathing. It is a personal tragedy like being killed by a falling tree or drowning in a pond. For there is no justice against the tree or the pond and McCarthy sees his murderers as beyond earthy human justice or any cosmological justice from a absent and unconcerned God. Because this natural killer is in total touch with the worst aggressive aspects of human nature, they frequently can see the darkest instincts within their fellow men.

Outer Dark however also has a familiar narrative structure to the dark folk tales of Eastern Europe where children are eaten by wolves. For in this story, an 18 year old girl and her slightly older brother commit incest and the brother hides the baby in the forest telling his sister that the baby died, a story she doesn't believe for a minute. He leaves home on a quest away from his sin and deed. She leaves home on a quest for the child which has been taken by a Rumplestilkin tinker that uses terminology that evokes the anti-semitic descriptions of Jews in the Middle Ages.. Simultaneous to their parallel paths through darkness, three murderers stalk the land and seem oddly related to bringing rough reconciliation or completion to the tragedy.

A Jungian interpretation of the novel is really in order also for the boy is a thief and liar in a world of thieves and liars. The girl seeks her child for 8 months and never stops lactating. This odd feature to this story may reflect the miraculous in the lives of Catholic Saints for the girl believed that as long as her breasts weep milk, that the child is still somewhere alive in the world. The boy and girl may represent two sides of the human personality and each has a path to follow toward reconciliation with the other. Underneath much of the horror is a redemption story for the innocent child he denies is the product of his sin. However the redemption is extremely dark in this tale of horror.





I Loved It But Not Sure Why   April 7, 2008
zorba (Bala Cynwyd, Pa USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

I thoroughly enjoyed this book (if "enjoyed" is the right word) but I have no idea what it's about. Like all the other McCarthy books I've read, it is compelling from word one. No one today shapes the English language like McCarthy. His every word is poetry. His ear for dialog and dialect is staggering. His description of everything, I mean EVERYTHING, is unerring, uncannily so. His ability to set a (mostly) dark and somber mood is (literally) scary. But I don't know what the book was about. I guess it was about a lot of things. No matter to me: I just enjoyed reading it. I enjoyed the suspense, the symbolism, the gothic emotion, the rawness of it. I've read several McCarthy books. I was lukewarm about the Border Trilogy, but hooked after "The Road", "No Country..." and others. Wonderful, masterful book. But I still don't know what it was about....