Child of God

By: Cormac McCarthy

Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte

Length: 3 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

In this taut, chilling audiobook, Lester Ballard - a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape - haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.

©1973 Cormac McCarthy (P)2012 Recorded Books

Meet Lester

That was freaky as freaky gets and I really liked the story and the telling of it.

Stark, and beautifully written, as always.

Cormac is a master, both of writing and of depicting the grit of life in all its horrible beauty and beautiful horror. Narrator's delivery was superb.

five stars

Wonderful, short, accessible performance of a nightmare horror masterpiece. Southern gothic at its very finest.

Good but short

Fascinating book, very much in line with other McCarthy books in style and quality. Lester Ballard is... Well what is he? A Child of Hod I suppose.

Originally Published In 1973

DO NOT READ this book. As an avid lover of horror, a person who loves character studies and someone with a soft spot for novels set in the south, I think this book is a solid work. Necrophilia. Check! Baby murder. Check! Dark comedy. Check! Quick read. Check! I change my mind. DO READ this book.

Disturbing, but engrossing

Story line is disturbing, but the prose dense & excellent. Narration was perfect. I have listened to several of Cormac McCarthy's books and enjoyed them. I had missed this & happened on it through seeing it on sale.

the story

liked everything, speaker, story. full of suspense. it reminded me of down home tales, spoken via fire light.

And HE has sent me here?

Look, I've read a lot of Cormac McCarthy and this is definitely not your Mother's McCarthy. I think this novel was the final pupa-state before McCarthy emerged as an absolute dark monster of fiction and heir to Faulkner's as ambassador to the strange malevolence of America's soul.

It wasn't as absurdly redeeming as 'Suttrre' or as coldly beautiful as 'Blood Meridian', but had the surreal shock and awe of both. His themes of isolation, perversity, depravity and violence make you feel like climbing into bed with Hannibal Lector or Jame Gumb for warmth and spiritual succor.

A great novel, just not a novel that everyone should read. Wander into the dark, damp cave of this McCarthy novel at your own risk.

Cormac McCarthy is just odd. Good, but odd.

First off - great story, and fantastic narration.

Second, it jumps. The storyline. I know that's a thing for McCarthy, and on a written page I bet it's (hopefully) a little more obvious. But in narration, there's spots that I doubled back, even tripled back, a few times, trying to understand what was going on. Once I got it, the story moved quickly and with such great detail and description, I knew exactly what was happening; but it was those odd scene changes that were jarring, all the way through the book.

This is not my first Cormac novel; (No Country For Old Men, which is amazing to read); so I knew what to expect with the graphic violence, (which didn't bother me at all) or sexual deviance, (also didn't bother me). His sense of timing was crazy. Sometimes, a scene goes so slow, detailing the tiniest bits, taking care to provide what's going on in the character's head, and then other times he's leaping forward in bounds.

I liked it. I enjoyed it; laughed, cringed, the whole thing. Like in No Country, he didn't really spend much time on the WHY something happened; it just happened and then the story unfolds.

I'd totally recommend it to somebody to listen to. I already have. I hope the movie nails the story.

Painful - in a, well, not good, but not bad way...

Any additional comments?

You can expect a little pain from Cormac McCarthy, and it's usually the kind that comes from engaging your emotional gears in a way your aren't used to, aren't prepared for, or that is just deeper than you normally experience. A soul workout you might say. In this story (it's barely long enough to be a "book") part of the pain is how you begin to sympathize with someone who is ultimately a pathetic anti-social murderer. You can see how the pain of his existence drives him to increasing desperation.

Not McCarthy's masterpiece, but definitely worthy of a listen if you like McCarthy's other stories.

By the way, the performance by Tom Stechschulte was superb.