Falsely accused of rape, Lester Ballard – a violent, dispossessed man who haunts the hill country of East Tennessee – is released from jail and allowed to roam at will, preying on the population with his strange lusts. His everyday actions are transformed into stunning scenes of the comic and the grotesque. And as the story hurtles toward its unforgettable conclusion, McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.
I’m really beginning to question this “genius” of Cormac McCarthy. Three books into his span of works, and they just seem to be getting worse.
And yes, I know Cormac McCarthy is not considered an author of horror, but make no mistake, this is as much a horror novel as Kristopher Triana’s Gone To See The River Man. McCarthy was on a roll with his first three novels. The first, The Orchard Keeper, involves a boy set to exact revenge on his father’s murderer, and ends up befriending him. The second, Outer Dark, involves infanticide and incest (Triana’s Lori, anyone?).
In this one, McCarthy fixes his unblinking, grammatically spare, lyrically narrative gaze on necrophilia. Which makes it amusing when I read the end of that blurb above…the part about McCarthy depicting “the most sordid aspects of life with dignity”…as though a rapist can violate a corpse in a dignified manner. Some copywriter was desperately earning his wage when he wrote that…
There’s also the quote by Tobias Wolff that appears on the cover pictured above: “His prose, unfailingly beautiful and exact, carries us into a dreamworld of astonishing and violent revelation.” I mostly agree with the first bit. Not so sure about the dreamworld part. But I will say I felt no astonishment or revelation whatsoever. Sorry Tobias, gotta call bullshit on that one.
But this slim book…I looked and looked, but could find no story here. This felt like an extreme horror indie release with better-than-average writing, packaged as an act of literary brilliance. Lester Ballard is a rather odious character with no redeeming qualities, and the reader is simply plunged through a series of ever-increasingly terrible events. Some minor kinks (the wearing of women’s undergarments, as an example) are seemingly tossed in just to make Ballard even weirder, but with no real importance to the thin story, such as it is.
McCarthy also stretches the suspension of disbelief by having Ballard, having just experienced a major amputation, still somehow manages to elude his followers through tight caves. There were at least two spots where I actually said, “Oh come on!” out loud.
And, without spoiling anything, there’s the end. There’s no real surprises to be found here, beyond wondering if McCarthy simply couldn’t come up with a better ending.
So, if you’re looking for a violence and necrophilia fix, McCarthy’s your man, and this is your book. But if you’re looking for a story, you may be left like I was, trying to understand why this was even published.
To be clear: I’m no prude. I can see where someone like Jack Ketchum may have pulled inspiration from a work like this, for novels like Off Season and The Girl Next Door, and even the casual violence of Hide and Seek and The Lost.
But…
Having said that, I can see Ketchum also deciding that, if he’s going to draw from a novel such as McCarthy’s Child of God, he’s going to write something and either make it have a point, or make the point obvious that there’s a reason evil like this exists in the world.
Instead of just, hey, here’s a story about a really terrible human. The end.
I really have no idea what the point of this novel was, aside from presenting a plotless story about a really terrible human, much like he did with Culla in Outer Dark. If someone wants to explain it to me, I’ll take it.
