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    Outer Dark
    Outer Dark
    Outer Dark
    Audiobook7 hours

    Outer Dark

    Written by Cormac McCarthy

    Narrated by Ed Sala

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road • A novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century.

    A woman bears her brother’s child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother’s lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.

    “He is nothing less than our greatest living writer.”—Houston Chronicle
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateApr 5, 2013
    ISBN9781470366353
    Outer Dark
    Author

    Cormac McCarthy

    Cormac McCarthy was the author of many acclaimed novels, including Blood Meridian, Child of God and The Passenger. Among his honours are the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His works adapted to film include All the Pretty Horses, The Road and No Country for Old Men – the latter film receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture. McCarthy died in 2023 in Santa Fe, NM at the age of 89.

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    Reviews for Outer Dark

    4/5

    602 ratings37 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Excellent the grammar is exquisite and enlightening. This author is a true story teller. Complex, characters set in harsh times. Loved it❤️

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Wow. What was that! The story is beautifully written... an apocalypse in a snow globe. I'm not sure where to begin with this. Maybe to say that it's The Hobbit meets Appalachia with heavy biblical overtones is a descent place to start and end.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Cormac McCarthy again delivers with his unique prose a world of pain and suffering unlike any other.
    • 5/5
      Flawed and sometimes self-conscious but exceptionally beautiful. Great dialogue. Foreshadowing of characters and themes in McCarthy's later novels.
    • 4/5
      8. Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy (1968, 262 page Kindle e-book, read Jan 27 - 31)This is McCarthy's second novel, and wow, what a change. [[Kenneth Lincoln]] says this book lays the foundation of all McCarthy's future work. The atmosphere feels post-apocalyptic, with carnage, insanity, hopelessness and even characters that act like demons. But, this is pre-automobile eastern Tennessee. No date or cultural timing references are given, but critics constantly say the era is around the year 1900.And yet, it is so compelling. It's a hard book to stop reading. When finished, late into the night, I couldn't put the book down and let it go. I went back and read the beginning again and then started looking up reviews and commentary online. For all the horrors, I found it a fun, addictive book. I just kept wondering about.Culla and Rinthy Holme, brother and sister living in extreme poverty in an isolated structure practically in the wilderness, conceive a child in incest. The guilt, while never spoken, is a focal point. It sets their fate. This is Culla's dream the day before birth (page 4)"There was a prophet standing in the square with arms upheld in exhortation to the beggared multitude gathered there. A delegation of human ruin who attended him with blind eyes upturned and puckered stumps and leprous sores. The sun hung on the cusp of eclipse and the prophet spoke to them. This hour the sun would darken and all these souls would be cured of their afflictions before it appeared again. And the dreamer himself was caught up among the supplicants and when they had been blessed and the sun began to blacken he did push forward and hold up his hand and call out. Me, he cried. Can I be cured? The prophet looked down as if surprised to see him there amidst such pariahs. The sun paused. He said: Yes, I think perhaps you will be cured. Then the sun buckled and dark fell like a shout. The last wirethin rim was crept away. They waited. Nothing moved. They waited a long time and it grew chill. Above them hung the stars of another season. There began a restlessness and a muttering. The sun did not return. It grew cold and more black and silent and some began to cry out and some despaired but the sun did not return. Now the dreamer grew fearful. Voices were being raised against him. He was caught up in the crowd and the stink of their rags filled his nostrils. They grew seething and more mutinous and he tried to hide among them but they knew him even in that pit of hopeless dark and fell upon him with howls of outrage."Culla will, of course, not be cured of his sin. When the baby is born, he takes it and abandons it in the woods, then returns back to the baby and almost retracts (this happens in a reverie of incomprehensible and yet fascinating syntax and obscure vocabulary). What plays out seems to be a condemnation of the pair to endless wandering. But there are curiosities and such hopeless darkness in the forms of poverty and violence. Culla will have something like the mark of Cain. He is always suspected of crimes he has nothing to do with, and finds himself running and running. And there are these three guys following him, acting like demons and massacring everyone he befriends. Rinthy chases after the baby. But, while her wanders are fruitless, she is always met with kindness and protected. The book plays it's dark self out darkly. I haven't read Divine Comedy, but I wouldn't be surprised if the passage through purgatory and hell has some parallels here. But part of what makes this book work is the humanity of the characters. We come to like so many of these characters we meet so briefly. They charm even in the flaws and even as we know that what is coming to them is not good. And I haven't mentioned the tinker - the peddling salesman who pushes his wares on cart, hated by pretty much everyone he encounters and yet smiles his way along. He is another central curiosity, and he is the one who finds the baby.It's a book that makes we wonder about what it is about religion that made McCarthy hate is so passionately and yet feel compelled to encounter it in such gory intimacy. Recommended highly for those willing to wade into this kind of stuff.
    • 4/5
      In rural Appalachia early in the last century Nineteen year-old Rinthy Holmes has her brother’s baby. Shamed, he abandons the baby in the woods, where a tinker finds it. When she can travel, Rinthy hunts her baby, and her brother, Culla, hunts her. They are unsophisticated backwoods people and easily victimized.In Outer Dark the story is in the journey rather than the destination. McCarthy crafts his words as well as he articulates the evil that can happen in the world. His writing about both nature and people is matched by few.
    • 3/5
      Bleak and ponderous with not much revelation but I did listen to it all so that says something.
    • 5/5
      McCarthy gives the reader a fascinating glimpse into the lives and minds of people who have lived in the back woods of Appalachia for generations - people whose lives seem aimless and with little or no opportunity to question the authority that governs them and which keeps them in their perpetual state of ignorance and poverty. McCarthy’s prose is poignant, at times hilarious, at times breathtaking and shocking and which is masterful in its depiction of Apalachia.
    • 4/5
      A dark and sad and violent book. I'm very impressed with the way McCarthy captures dialect, and his use of language and his style. Not a good book to read if you want cheering up, but a very well written book that makes me want to read more of his work.
    • 4/5
      By this, his second novel, most of the McCarthy greatness is present, but he still had to shed a few of the sillier stuff that was dragging him down--most importantly, his belief that people can still be shocked by incest, the murder of the innocents, and infantophagy. Yes, the former is meant to put this squarely in Greek tragedy territory, but the latter (only hinted at, even here) as been de rigueur since Swift, and the murder of innocents functions much better in Blood Meridian, where instead of being the 'terrible' climax, it simply suffuses the entirety of the book/universe.

      But that can be ignored. This is my second time through Outer Dark, and it really is an excellent novel: memorable scenes, an accurate depiction of childbirth and its after-effects, and much, much tighter than Orchard Keeper. This might be the place to start with McCarthy, in fact.
    • 3/5
      This is taken from the blog for consistency:

      Here we go again.

      Three stars. (Sorry McCarthy fans.) In my opinion, it's a generous ranking for OUTER DARK.

      UPDATE: I lied. Make that two stars. (i.e. it was okay)

      **************************************************************************************************************************************************************

      I so want to love McCarthy, and I don't even know why. I have read a couple books by him I liked, but these last two? Meh. Double meh on OUTER DARK. At this point, CHILD OF GOD, SUTTREE, and OUTER DARK haven't held up in comparison with THE ROAD. I should probably read THE ROAD again, just to see how his writing changed between that story and these earlier works. I don't remember nitpicking over the style of it. I do recall that the boy was rather cryptic. "Yes." "Okay." I don't recall the father being verbose either. Those weren't chatty times however, considering the premise.

      I think I'm beginning to get the sense of McCarthy, or more accurately, his style. Basically it's to use odd, rarely used words (that require a dictionary for most of us), then try as hard as possible to fling a multitude of them into a sentence. Pick the most taboo subject (OUTER DARK is about incest between a brother and sister, CHILD OF GOD was about necrophilia) and use it in a story. Make sure your characters are mostly miserable, yet sometimes funny. Make sure they say, "I got to get on," several times and have the other character interrupt and delay their departure. Again and again. Do it multiple times throughout the book. Do it in several books. Start most conversations off with "Hidy." (for those not sure, quaint way of saying "howdy.") I think what I'm saying is, his technique is repetitive and his characters come out sounding very much alike.

      I have to hand it to him on one thing. He's a master at developing a scene via dialogue. In OUTER DARK, there's one where one of the main characters (Holme as he's called), is watching a handful of drovers lead a bunch of pigs to some distant place. One of them stops to have a conversation with Holme and then goes on. The pigs get a little crazy and next thing everyone knows, a good portion of them are careening off into a ravine. The man Holme spoke with also ends up going over the edge somehow. Holme goes up to the bunch and says, "what happened?" They don't know. Next, a preacher walks up. ("Hidy") And before long, the other men are blaming Holme for the death of their friend, eyeing him with suspicion because all the while, the preacher with his repeated "don't hang him," plants this very idea into their heads. Definitely skilled at this sort of thing.

      I thought maybe I'd simply chosen the wrong books. I peeked at ALL THE PRETTY HORSES on Amazon and began reading the preview. I barely got past the first page. I flipped a few more. I saw "I better get on back." The other character continued the conversation. "I better get on." (again)

      Yep, I'm through and through at the moment. I can't bring myself to buy another one. At this time, BLOOD MERIDIAN is the last McCarthy book in my TBR pile. It just might have to sit there a while.
    • 5/5
      One of McCarthy's earlier books (his second), it clearly exhibits the essential characteristics of his writing: minimalist and brutal, yet at the same time insightful and some of the most beautiful, expressive prose in the English language. I have yet to find an author who can put me right in a place as clearly and distinctly as McCarthy.This is the story of Culla and Rinthy Holme (brother and sister) who have a baby. Telling Rinthy that the baby had died, Culla abandons the baby in the woods. When Rinthy discovers Culla lied, she sets out to find the child and the man she believes has taken it; Culla sets out to find Rinthy. As tends to be characteristic of McCarthy's work, the story is bleak, populated by people kind and cruel, helpful and hostile, civilized and barbaric. Life is not easy in McCarthy's world.While not as gruesome as Child of God, Outer Dark is unforgiving, and does not spare the reader from confrontations with pure evil.As I continue to read McCarthy's works I sit in awe of his ability to combine brutality and beauty with the same words.
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed the book but it didn't "WOW" me. It didn't throw me into the world or give me any emotional turmoil over the characters. Overall it is nicely written but nothing special. The mystery wasn't very suspenseful. I felt disconnected from the characters. When an emotional event occurred, I didn't feel the appropriate pang of sadness or the ping of joy. The writing is done well and the descriptions are done beautifully but the story is lacking a connectivity that brings you close to the characters of the book.

      The dark themes and characters ARE disturbing, shocking and chilling but because I felt disjointed from the main characters and the world, it didn't have as profound an effect that it should have had. McCarthy had a great idea, great writing and style but didn't execute the plot or the characters very well. If this is your first McCarthy book, be warned.
    • 4/5
      I'm writing this almost five years after reading Outer Dark. All I remember is that the three men after Culla are terrifying and the tinker is creepy. Rinthy is such a pitiful character. McCarthy's sense of doom is well on display here in his second book.
    • 5/5
      A brother and a sister are both hunting something out in the backcountry while three mysterious strangers follow them, leaving a band of sorrow in their wake. "Outer Dark" truly lived up to it's name: it was dark and way, way, out there. Picture mixing "Flowers in the attic" with whatever you imagine a moonshiner to look like and there you go. I did not enjoy this one as much as "The Road" but it was good in it's own way. The language and writing style is stunning.
    • 5/5
      Another darkly evocative novel from Cormac McCarthy! Frankly, a quote by the tinker sums up how one feels after reading about the tortured lives of these characters. I seen the meanness of people 'til I don't know why God don't turn out the sun and walk away." I don't feel that way in general, but McCarthy reminds me of the hardship people live through and keep putting one foot in front of another.
    • 4/5
      This was an odd story, and I can't say that I "enjoyed" it (the subject matter and turn of events are a bit grim for that), but it was wonderfully written and kept me turning the pages, and I most definitely want to see more of what Cormac McCarthy has to offer.
    • 3/5
      There's plenty of darkness inside Outer Dark. This book has some beautifully written passages, but I found less hope in this story than I did in The Road and that made it a somewhat depressing read. McCarthy has an unconventional writing style - he knows the rules and then breaks them with flair along with gracefully written descriptive passages that contain elements of poetry. However, the overall story left me with a desire to see more of the redemptive side of human nature. Each of us contains darkness and light within us, and true to the title this book describes the darkness — both within and without.
    • 3/5
      A dreary and menacing, slow-boiling narrative culminates in an act of utter horror which highlights the futility of the protagonists' struggles. . . and ostensibly of existence in general. One of the more depressing novels I've ever read, on display in Cormac McCarthy's second book is his now-usual mastery of tone and his awe-inspiring dialogue, so natural that it amazes you to realize that McCarthy wasn't an eyewitness of the times.

      Here is a supremely confident writer, already supremely confident very early in his career. He uses words and grammar in combinations that are not intuitive and may not even be technically correct, but at no point do you misunderstand his meaning; in that way he is a superlative wordsmith, twisting and coaxing words and phrases to elicit a precise significance that is rarely lost on the reader.

      He does get too fancy for me at times, edging into pretentiousness. His penchant for using obscure word piled upon obscure word comes off as flaunting and can be distracting throughout the novel. You can pretty much open the book to any random page and find an example or two, but I'll include one that particularly stuck out toward the end: What discordant vespers do the tinker's goods chime through the long twilight and over the brindled forest road, him stooped and hounded through the windy recrements of day like those old exiles who divorced of corporeality and enjoined ingress of heaven or hell wander forever the middle warrens spoorless increate and anathema. Hounded by grief, by guilt, or like this cheerless vendor clamored at heel through wood and fen by his own querulous and inconsolable wares in perennial tin malediction. 229
      Now this is a particualrly egregious example, but c'mon, what does that even mean?! "Discordant vespers"? "Brindled"? "Recrements"? "Middle warrens spoorless increate and anathema"? "Perennial tin malediction"? Spellcheck doesn't even know some of these words! Unfortunately, McCarthy just appears to be trying way too hard in passages like these. Thankfully he would learn restraint in later works.

      He's still my favorite living author though!
    • 5/5
      Just a tad disturbing. "Did they really...?" "Yes, they did."
    • 3/5
      I do like McCarthy's writing style, I loved The Road. While this book kept me reading as I was pulled into where this book was going, I kept wondering what is truly to story line and when would the paths intertwine. Overall the ending was unexpected and lacked detail and closure. I was excited up until the last 50 or so pages and complete lost me by the end...
    • 4/5
      Southern Gothic taken to such an extreme that it almost becomes camp. Very enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      Great book. But, if you like endings that wrap everything up nicely and leave you feeling satisfied that all questions have been answered, then this book is not for you. McCarthy takes you on a fun ride in the process.
    • 3/5
      In a rundown cabin, perhaps in the forest or in the mountains, Rinthy Holme gives birth to a boy. Her brother Culla should be happy, but instead tells Rinthy that the child died and takes him -- his own son -- into the forest and leaves him on a tree stump. When Rinthy learns of Culla's deceit, she packs up her few belongings and runs away, determined to find her son and the tinker who she believes took him. Culla returns home from a day out hunting for work and finds Rinthy gone. So he sets out on his own quest to find her. As each sibling travels through the many counties, a dark trio of men wreaks havoc on the same countryside, heading toward a confrontation with the brother and sister.As with all McCarthy's books that I've read so far, he has an interesting way with language that makes a character's voice seem real and down to earth, giving them a time and a place, such as with the dialect that the Holmes' and the men and the people they encounter. And you believe those characters. Couple that with his descriptions of the countryside or towns or the people themselves, and you can clearly imagine the harsh landscape, with rutted roads and dilapidated buildings.However, I only somewhat enjoyed the story of Culla and Rinthy traveling their different ways through the towns. While it was clear that Rinthy searched for her son and the tinker, Culla's journey seems to be consumed with looking for work rather than finding his sister, though ostensibly that's why he's roaming the countryside. As for the dark trio, I wasn't quite sure of their role in this, either. Why were they terrorizing the countryside? Why did they seem to know so much about Culla and what he did to Rinthy? I felt as though some piece of the puzzle were missing that would have made their actions more logical to the story.
    • 4/5
      Possibly one of the most depressing, depraved books ever written.
    • 5/5
      Where do I start?....This is Cormacs second novel and starts as dark as it continues. A brother and sister father a child. The brother tells her the child has died, but actually leaves it to perish in the forest. The lie is found out and the sister goes in search of the childs whereabouts. In turn the brother follows to find the sister....Along each siblings journey they encounter various characters and ways of life.As with all of mcarthys works don't expect anyone to have a good time or be particularly joyous. His usual desolate descriptive prose cuts right through to the bone. A little hard to follow at times, but it is always worth the effort.Cormac Mcarthy is an amazing writer and one that I can see being studied for generations to come
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed reading this. The story was very sparse, and of course, as with all Cormac McCarthy novels, prepare to be depressed. There ain't a one person who is nice to another in all the world, it seems, and this story is no different. He nailed the Appalachian dialect. Reading the dialogue was a real treat, and not cumbersome in the least.The story was spare and Gothic, but I'm not sure what I mean by that. Other reviews have said it's a classic Western set in the Appalachians, but I don't figure I'm familiar enough with the Western genre to say that. There wasn't much in the way of character development, but that's okay. The thrill in reading this story is more situational. The landscapes are painted beautifully, and most of the people are creepy and mean spirited. There were a few things I didn't quite understand in this edition--most chapters had a mini-chapter in italics in between, just a page or two long. Most of the time they made sense in the context of one or another of the story lines, but one or two left me wondering exactly what had happened.To tell you just how engrossing this novel was: I usually pick up a number of books in any given week and start reading, put it down, read little bits, switch books. What I mean to say is I don't currently have the attention span to finish novels, but I read the first page of this and pretty much read it until it was over. The first few paragraphs make it impossible to put down.
    • 3/5
      Southern Gothic - almost. Wasnt that shocking or frightening- held my interest but rather disapointing
    • 4/5
      One of Cormac McCarthy's early novels, set in a rural landscape somewhere in a pre-modern Appalachia, "The Outer Dark" is a dark disturbing story about Rinthy Holme's search for her lost baby, the product of an incestuous union with her brother Culla, who unknown to Rinthy, has abandoned the baby deep in the woods, telling Rinthy he died. The child, left to die, survives, rescued by a tinker. There's no great depth - or twists - of plot in "The Outer Dark". Rather than plot-driven, the narrative cross-cuts intermittently between two separate journeys made by brother and sister - a structure that allows McCarthy scope at once to describe Rinthy (in search of lost child on discovery of Culla's lie) and Culla's wanderings in the landscape they pass through and the mixed-bag of eccentric, grotesque characters they encounter on their travels. "The Outer Dark" is about a landscape and the people who inhabit it. Colourful set-pieces involving Rinthy and Culla, in encounters and 'run-ins' with crusty 'locals' - and cranky backwoods southerners often living in squalor in dilapidated shacks and isolated cabins deep in the woods - who cross their separate paths, are interspersed with sharp dialogue and sardonic wit. A dark mood pervades this Southern Gothic novel. An early scene - where Culla flees the scene of his evil act, careering through the dark depths of the forest in full flight, hands outstretched before him "against whatever the dark might hold" - is heavy with portent, as if something dreadful, some unseen malevolent presence were about. For Culla, whatever the 'dark' might hold, remains to be seen. And that sense of ominous foreboding continues through much of 'The Outer Dark'. Out of the 'dark' too, like outcasts straight from Hell, the coming of three terrifying figures roaming the land with murderous intent, manifested in the shock-horror violence of a gruesome, disturbing climax. Welcome to Cormac McCarthy Country! Incest! Cannibalism! Shock-horror violence! Not for the squeamish. Too much perhaps for the faint-of-heart to endure? Okay, McCarthy's style of writing may not be to everyone's taste. But if you enjoy the chilling walk through the 'dark' woods of "The Outer Dark", book up for another trip into McCarthy country with "Child of God" or "The Orchard Keeper". And with echoes of 'McCarthy Country', Castle Freeman's gripping short novel "Go With Me" takes the reader on a suspenseful mystery ride, tense with foreboding, deep into the bleak backwoods of Vermont. Good reading!
    • 4/5
      Draw a line from William Faulkner through the midnight dark of the human soul and at the end of it you will find Cormac McCarthy, picking over the bones of murderer and murdered, like some oracle seeking the truth of the ways of man and god. McCarthy’s god is, at best, indifferent. At worst, malevolent and sadistic.Set in the mythical southern Appalachia of Faulkner, this novel is sparse and stark. It follows an incestuous brother and sister. She bears his child; he abandons it to the elements. The baby is taken by a passing tinker. She sets out to find the baby. The brother sets out to find her. Along the way they encounter good and evil in many forms. Look for no happy ending here.