Recommendations
Books Like Child of God
Best books to read after Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy's Child of God is his most disturbing novel — Lester Ballard's descent into isolation and violence. These recommendations continue the McCarthy canon, explore the southern gothic tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the American novel of radical evil and Appalachian darkness.
- 1Buy
Outer Dark
by Cormac McCarthy
The preceding Southern gothic — the Tennessee hill country incest story with the three murderous tramps, McCarthy's most concentrated early novel and the one that most directly leads to Child of God's exploration of Appalachian darkness.
- 2Buy
Suttree
by Cormac McCarthy
The succeeding Southern masterpiece — Suttree on his houseboat in Knoxville, the most expansive and humane of the early McCarthy novels, essential reading as part of the same Southern Tennessee sequence.
- 3Buy
Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
The Western novel that Child of God's Lester Ballard anticipates — the Judge as the most fully realized version of the radical evil that Ballard only incompletely embodies, McCarthy's prose at its most extraordinary.
- 4Buy
The Violent Bear It Away
by Flannery O'Connor
The southern gothic predecessor — Francis Tarwater's prophetic violence, O'Connor's second novel sharing McCarthy's interest in a young man from the rural South driven by forces he cannot understand toward an act of terrible violence.
- 5Buy
American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis
The urban equivalent of Lester Ballard — Patrick Bateman's obsessive violence in Manhattan, Ellis writing the same kind of novel about a man who has lost his purchase on ordinary social existence, in a completely different setting.
- 6Buy
In Cold Blood
by Truman Capote
The true crime companion — the Clutter family murders in Holcomb, Kansas, Capote's literary journalism giving the same quality of attention to actual killers that McCarthy gives to fictional ones, the closest non-fiction equivalent to Child of God.
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The Killer Inside Me
by Jim Thompson
The noir equivalent — Lou Ford, small-town deputy sheriff and sociopath, Thompson's first-person crime novel the closest genre equivalent to the formal challenge of reading a character as far outside social norms as Lester Ballard.
- 8Buy
Wise Blood
by Flannery O'Connor
The southern gothic companion — Hazel Motes and the Church Without Christ, O'Connor's tradition of the religious grotesque that McCarthy both inherits and secularizes in Child of God's treatment of Ballard as a dark parody of a child of God.
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