What I Am Reading - Child of God

Child of God

Cormac McCarthy

Read it in small paper back at 208 pages.

September's selection went to Sam and another Cormac McCarthy book was selected.  This to be my third and I believe Sam's 4th or 5th McCarthy.  Despite the fact that no one in OLT book club can stand McCarthy's infuriating writing styles, the stories are just too gripping and dark. Child of God is no different.

Child of God opens with the main character, Lester Ballard, losing his home on the auction block.  With nowhere to go, Lester escapes to the mountains of Tennessee living a life of destitution.  Over time, Lester falls victim to more and more depravity, and such is the  focus of the book. 

With such a short tale, I would rather not give any more information in the general review.

If you have not read McCarthy, do not let this be your first…although I can't think of one that should…

Onwards with spoilers below.

This is the second McCarthy pick for OLT book-club.  The first was Blood Meridian which got a pretty high average score of 7.6, so how did Child of God fair?  Well, we had eight people finish, a pretty healthy amount really, and the scoring is on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being a vomit rage and 10 as holy scripture:

Th3ee: 7

Dust: 6

Hylen: 3

G$$: 7

SS: 6

BoozyCoug: 6

Tech-man-Dave: 3

Shelly-the-don: 7

An average of 5.6, lower than expected, but high for a book with such a dark subject matter.

Favorite character went to the deranged Lester, which makes sense since most of the other characters are not fleshed out for the reader.  Some notable call-outs for sub characters in the Sheriff and a black-smith who tries to teach Lester a thing or two.  Lester's killings were among peoples favorite and least favorite moments.  While the people that scored it higher seemed to like the dark nature that engulfs and takes over Lester, many others just thought it was too much and too dark.  I can't blame them, feeding the alligators is hard, especially when you are of moral constitution and kicked out as many alligators in your head as possible.  The higher moral authority among us enjoyed the bits of the book where others were attempting to show empathy to dear Lester.  Universally though, we all seemed to abhor a moment in which a father is raping his daughter or Lester is fucking a corpse, so perhaps there is hope for all of us.

If any of the above paragraph was offensive, do not read this book.