Child of God

Child of God (1973) is the third novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. It depicts the life of a violent young outcast and serial killer in 1960s Appalachian Tennessee. Though the novel received critical praise, it was not a financial success. Like its predecessor Outer Dark (1968), Child of God established McCarthy's interest in using extreme isolation, perversity, and violence to represent human experience. McCarthy ignores literary conventions – for example, he does not use quotation marks – and switches between several styles of writing such as matter-of-fact descriptions, almost poetic prose, and colloquial first-person narration (with the speaker remaining unidentified). Plot summary Set in mountainous Sevier County, Tennessee, in the 1960s, Child of God tells the story of Lester Ballard, a dispossessed, violent man whom the narrator describes as "a child of God much like yourself perhaps". Ballard is violently evicted from his home, which is sold at auction to another Sevier County resident, John Greer. Now homeless, Ballard begins squatting in an abandoned two-room cabin and voyeuristically spying on young couples in their cars near the Frog Mountain turnaround. Ballard is falsely accused of rape by a woman he finds sleeping along the roadside, and is jailed for nine days. Interspersed among the narrator's story are townspeople's accounts of Ballard's early life, revealing his early violent behavior and the suicide of his father. While out squirrel hunting, Ballard comes across a dead couple in an idling car. He steals the couple's money, rapes the woman's corpse, and stores her body in the attic of his cabin. Ballard's cabin burns down with the corpse inside, and he moves his remaining possessions into a nearby cave. Ballard visits his friend's home, finding only the friend's daughter and a disabled child. When the daughter rejects his sexual advances, he kills her and sets the house ablaze, storing her body in the cave. Later, Ballard shoots a couple in their car. As he flees the scene with the woman's corpse, he sees that the man survived and drove away. Prompted by the string of murders, the county sheriff begins investigating Ballard. The county floods, and the sheriff recalls the county's history of vigilantism with the Whitecaps and Bluebills.