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Child of God
  

Child of God (Hardcover)

by Cormac McCarthy (Author)
4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
Price: CDN$ 33.61 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 39. Details
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Frequently Bought Together

Child of God + Outer Dark + Suttree
Total List Price: CDN$ 70.55
Price For All Three: CDN$ 60.57

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  • This item: Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

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    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 39. Details

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Product Details


Product Description

From Amazon.com

"Scuttling down the mountain with the thing on his back he looked like a man beset by some ghast succubus, the dead girl riding him with legs bowed akimbo like a monstrous frog." Child of God must be the most sympathetic portrayal of necrophilia in all of literature. The hero, Lester Ballard, is expelled from his human family and ends up living in underground caves, which he peoples with his trophies: giant stuffed animals won in carnival shooting galleries and the decomposing corpses of his victims. Cormac McCarthy's much-admired prose is suspenseful, rich with detail, and yet restrained, even delicate, in its images of Lester's activities. So tightly focused is the story on this one "child of God" that it resembles a myth, or parable. "You could say that he's sustained by his fellow men, like you.... A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it." --This text refers to the Paperback edition.


Product Description

In this taut, chilling novel, Lester Ballard--a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape--haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail.  While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Customer Reviews

20 Reviews
5 star:
 (16)
4 star:
 (3)
3 star:    (0)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.7 out of 5 stars (20 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most helpful customer reviews

 
4.0 out of 5 stars Hauting, disturbing...like William Faulkner meets the Hills Have Eyes., Dec 11 2007
By Benjamin Anderson (Fredericton, NB CAN) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Child of God (Paperback)
Excellent book. I'm not certain how long "Child of God" took McCarthy to write, but his prose truly develops into something wonderful about halfway through the book. Exceptionally written. An expert use of pathos.

Highly recommended.
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4.0 out of 5 stars Dark, disturbing, haunting, Feb 28 2002
By Steve (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Child of God (Paperback)
There is no denying the strain of Faulkner that runs through McCarthy's early works; like his predecessor, McCarthy is concerned less with plot than with character and the many and sundry ways in which character and place (here, the hills of Eastern Tennessee) interact. But McCarthy is more fun to read; his prose is lean and lyric and leaves lasting images in the mind's eye. He does not shrink from displaying humanity in all its ugly (often ungodly) forms. "Child of God" is best-known for its haunting portrayal of necrophilia--few writers could address so ghastly an act in such beautiful, elegant prose. But that is one of the great joys of Cormac McCarthy's early novels--they are not so much tours de force as they are exhibitions of beautifully painted landscape and haunting, nightmarish imagery.
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4.0 out of 5 stars Chicken Soup For The Necrophiliacs Soul, Feb 15 2002
By "rodney23" (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Child of God (Paperback)
I read McCarthy's "Blood Meridian", loved it and decided to check out some of his other works. So I picked this up with huge expectations. In the end, I was not disappointed. Now, on with the review:

McCarthy seems to have taken bits of the life of Wisconsin killer, Ed Gein, combined them with bit of local (Tennessee) legend and created a very entertaining (albeit twisted) tale.

While this work is a little rough-around-the-edges (after about 30 pages that becomes part of its charm), it moves at a very lively pace, and is packed with some of the most disturbing (often done in an oddly humorous way) scenes ever put down on paper.

McCarthy has a great sense for rural America. Not that cute, Lake Wobegonish ruralism. This is closer to Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood". It may not be politically correct but Hillbillies are creepy and Lester Ballard, the novel's protagonist, is the creepiest Hillbilly.

The great thing about Lester is that he isn't blatantly good or evil, he's just lives from day-to-day not unlike an animal. Animals need to eat, sleep, and mate. Lester eats what he can shoot, sleeps in a shack on an old mattress and mates...well, that's were Lester's problems really manifest themselves. Let's just say that to every problem, there's a solution.

My only complaint is that a promising narrative device (using the locals to fill in Lester's past) is dropped early in the book. The final chapters (and, believe me, they are priceless) more than make up for this flaw.

So, if you're still wondering rather this book is worth purchasing, let me just quote Lester Ballard and say "Any time you get to feelin' froggy - jump."

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Stretches the subject matter of fiction to its limits
I have read sevral of McCarthy's other novels. His best ones stretch something to the limit. In <Blood Meridian> it was violence. Read more
Published on Feb 3 2002 by William J. Fickling

5.0 out of 5 stars Intense and disturbing
This is a gripping novel that probes the breadth of human depravity and perversity while plunging the reader into a malevolent and sinister world. Read more
Published on Dec 27 2001 by Robert Ortiz

1.0 out of 5 stars Peter Smith hardcover WARNING!!!
If you're considering buying the Peter Smith "edition" of this book, note that it is NOT a new "edition" in hardcover but the Vintage International edition rebound in red cloth,... Read more
Published on Nov 27 2001 by Allan MacInnis

5.0 out of 5 stars McCarthy's Argument with God
The works of Cormac McCarthy, America's greatest living writer, brim with violence, cruelty and depravity. Read more
Published on Nov 18 2001 by John J. Ross

5.0 out of 5 stars the bond of depravity
McCarthy has taken not just the grotesque, but the disgusting, and worked wonders. He points us to our own human depravity through the example of the grendel-like character of... Read more
Published on Jun 6 2001 by hardcorepoetic

5.0 out of 5 stars Not Faulkner Lite
Cormac McCarthy is one of the most accessible of modern authors. This in no way diminishes his accomplishments, as he is adept at so many facets of the writer's art. Read more
Published on Dec 8 2000 by Bruce Kendall

5.0 out of 5 stars Loveless.
McCarthy even goes so far as to force the reader to *identify* with Lester Ballard.... Not Ballard the serial killer, or Ballard the necrophiliac, but rather that "misplaced and... Read more
Published on Oct 7 2000 by In One Ear Out Your Mother

5.0 out of 5 stars A grotesque masterpiece
Cormac McCarthy, the heir to the Faulknerian tradition (and, in my opinion, a better artist than its founder), has created what is perhaps the most disturbing and beautiful novel... Read more
Published on Jul 1 2000

5.0 out of 5 stars Grotesque masterpiece.
This may be the scariest ride in contemporary American fiction. A tale of the crazed Lester Ballard and his gradual slide into absolute depravity--necrophilia is just the... Read more
Published on April 17 2000 by elljay

5.0 out of 5 stars Pulchrum est paucorum hominum.
"Child of God" defies, perhaps more forbiddingly than any other work in McCarthy's magisterial corpus, the fashionable impertinence which not infrequently inspires the... Read more
Published on April 2 2000

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