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A review by ledimirnunez
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
5.0
Lester Ballard is unforgiving, weird, and amoral. I didn't know what to expect when I picked up Child of God, but this left me feeling how I felt when reading Lolita. Cormac McCarthy’s writing is so darn exquisite, but the story itself is demoralizing and scary.
McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks, but you can still follow the dialogue and he somehow captures a vernacular that makes you feel you inhabit the world he creates, which if you did, be very careful around Lester Ballard.
Ballard, whom you hear about through hearsay, is labeled a sort of sociopathic outcast. You can tell he’s been through some things, and initially, I kind of wonder if I can trust the things people were saying about him. Sometimes people lie, they make up stories, and maybe he just went through some things. But what you see is how these stories about him begin to shatter the trust in a town, no one wants to be alone with him. His interactions are downright weird and spiral down to the grotesque. I’ll let you take the journey and meet Ballard for yourself, but what McCarthy did in this novel is nothing short of amazing.
It’s a short book, about 200 pages, total. I couldn’t put it down!
McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks, but you can still follow the dialogue and he somehow captures a vernacular that makes you feel you inhabit the world he creates, which if you did, be very careful around Lester Ballard.
Ballard, whom you hear about through hearsay, is labeled a sort of sociopathic outcast. You can tell he’s been through some things, and initially, I kind of wonder if I can trust the things people were saying about him. Sometimes people lie, they make up stories, and maybe he just went through some things. But what you see is how these stories about him begin to shatter the trust in a town, no one wants to be alone with him. His interactions are downright weird and spiral down to the grotesque. I’ll let you take the journey and meet Ballard for yourself, but what McCarthy did in this novel is nothing short of amazing.
It’s a short book, about 200 pages, total. I couldn’t put it down!