About this title: Cormac McCarthy's 1968 novel (his second) begins with the birth of a child to Rinthy Holme--a baby boy, who is taken off to the woods and left to die by Culla, Rinthy's brother--who is also the baby's father. Believing her son to be alive, Rinthy undertakes a quest to find him, and Culla begins to roam the Appalachian countryside on a mysterious quest of his own. He is menaced by three strangers--symbols perhaps of Culla's guilt--who commit heinous crimes for which Culla is blamed. McCarthy's dark tale has been compared to the kind of harsh folk fables that have traditionally been part of ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Picador
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780330314923ISBN:0330314920
Description: Good. Small tear at bottom of front cover, otherwise a good+ copy with just a couple of light creases to covers. Internally very good. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 1993
ISBN-13:9780679728733ISBN:0679728732
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage Books
Date Published: 1993-06-01
ISBN-13:9780679728733ISBN:0679728732
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780679728733. read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Edition: First edition.
Binding: publisher's cloth-backed boards in dust jacket.
Publisher: [1968], Random House
Description: New York: Boards very slightly sunned at edges; otherwise fine in a jacket with a few tiny chips and very light wear at extremities, and a 1" closed scrape to the center of the spine. 242 pp. 8vo, read more
Description: Very Good. New York: Random House. 1968. First edition. 5.75x8.25". Half cloth hardcover, with light blue spine and grey boards. Silver and blue lettering on spine. 242 pp. Good dust jacket, clean with some edge tears. Cover is clean with some slightly fading around edges and spine. Inside fairly clean. Front end page has "D" stamp. read more
Edition: 1st Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Random House
Date Published: 1968
Description: Fine in Fine jacket. Signed by Author First Edition (first printing). The second novel by the author of BLOOD MERIDIAN and ALL THE PRETTY HORSES, the story of a woman who bears her brother's child--and sets forth to find her son when she determines that her brother has lied about it dying a natural death. About Fine/Near Fine. Two minor (less than 1/4") closed tears to the dust jacket panels and incidental crimping at the head and foot of the dust jacket spine, else a clean copy. Inscribed by ... read more
Binding: Unknown Binding
Publisher: Vintage/Random House
Date Published: 1993
ISBN-13:9780679728733ISBN:0679728732
Description: Acceptable. -Acceptable: A readable copy. All pages are intact, and the cover is intact (the dust cover may be missing). Pages can include considerable notes--in pen or highlighter--but the notes cannot obscure the text. About Austin eBooks Austin eBooks is committed to providing each customer with the highest standard of customer service! We add inventory to our store daily, and guarantee order processing and shipment within 2 business days. read more
Description: New. Outer Dark is 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 natura... read more
"The rich flora/fauna of the rural landscape, the idiom of the characters and their shared impending dark fate are hallmarks of McCarthy's works I have come deeply to enjoy and expect. Outer Dark, one his earlier works, did not disappoint. I am reminded of Caldwell's "Tobacco Road" with the vivid picture McCarthy paints of Southeast at the turn of the 19th century. The closeness to the land and the rawness that runs through the characters gave me a glimpse of the culture within some of my forebears emerged from.
While the dark, brutal, specters of destruction that interweave through out the story serve to propel the story towards some inevitable conclusion, I found their presence, as with other such characters in McCarthy's works, to confirm a desire to hide from the darkness that surrounds our life in whatever age or time period we live in."
"I'm glad there are still these early Cormac McCarthy's I have still to get to. He's never been the sort of writer that I want to chain-read. McCarthy's second novel is pure Southern Gothic horror. Culla gets his sister Rinthy with child, hides her away in their backcountry Appalachian cabin until the babe is born in a welter of pain and blood, and then runs off stumbling and desperate through the night with the infant through the swamps and hollers to leave it out in the woods for some predator to finish. Rinthy demands to see the body, only to find no trace at all, and surmises that her son has been carried off by a wandering tinker in his cart. The rest of the book is the duel journeys of Rinthy as she searches for her child, and Culla as he searches for something unclear. There is serious evil afoot in the land: a seemingly primeval trio of savage horsemen who rob, murder, and cannibalize. The atmosphere is heavy with dread. Folks who've read No Country for Old Men, The Road or Blood Meridian will recognize many of the same themes and situations here, but in a simpler rendition like a spooky backwoods Grimm story. An awesomely creepy piece of work - ghastly, grisly, ghoulish, glorious."
"Cormac McCarthy is more than just a writer of fiction. He is a poet, a seer, and a craftsman. I envy his powers and fear them. An effort like Outer Dark, coming at an earlier stage in his career, is not his best, and it's still better than ninety-nine point nine nine percent of what everybody else is writing. He's just that good. This time out we're in Appalachia, around the turn of the last century, a time of travelin' tinkers, incest, and hangin'. Rinthy Holme is impregnated by her brother Cula, and when she has the child he takes it and abandons it in the woods. It is found and saved by the aforementioned tinker, and when Rinthy suspects what Cula has done, she takes off after the child; meanwhile, Cula has fled in a fit of guilt. The two travel over a countryside fraught with danger and various colorful characters that could only appear in a McCarthy novel. They're all sad, lonely, quick-to-violence freak show players, but McCarthy, though his writing sometimes contains outbreaks of humor as sudden as is the violence that inhabits his world, never allows this to become comedy or parody. Rather, his world, and depiction of a time past is hyper-real; I believe every word of it, which makes the casual racism, domestic abuse, illiteracy, and lawlessness all the more disturbing. The prose is breathtaking, the dialogue, halting and terse as it is, is completely believable, and work like this doesn't even sound like fiction. I've said before, in reading McCarthy, that he's about as close to any author I've found who writes as though he is actually standing there, transcribing in some divine notebook what is actually taking place as it is happening, word for word, gesture for gesture. But the best thing about McCarthy is that he allows these stories to end, eventually, releasing you from the times that he, seemingly, so effortlessly captures. It's not a time I would ever want to live in, and these are not people I would ever want to meet, not a single one of them."
"Outer Dark is the McCarthy book that, for me, bears the most blatant marks of the Faulkner influence. Reading it felt like a twisted journey into an alternative dimension of Light in August, but instead of chasing a no-good boyfriend, Rinthy chases her child. The three interspersed dark strangers color everything else in this book, from Rinthy to Holme, in tones of overcast black and gray. Sudden violence interrupts pastoral descriptions of a hardened Appalachia and strikes a balance that not only questions my conceptions of beauty, but of civilization and the idea of destination. This may be the McCarthy specialty that I like the best. The violence is so lightning-quick and well-meshed into the narrative that I often find myself understanding the action without being able to remember the words of the violent passage. I second-guess myself and have to go back and search for those words. "Did what I think happened really just happen?" I'll flip back in disbelief. McCarthy seems to have access to some part of the reading brain that I don't understand, and his beautiful language forms an image whose final product far outshines the sum of its parts."
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