Reading Order
Child of God Reading Order
Cormac McCarthy's Child of God (1973) is his most disturbing novel — Lester Ballard, a dispossessed Appalachian man who loses his land and his place in the community, and descends into isolation, murder, and necrophilia, living in a cave and claiming the dead. McCarthy narrates Ballard's story with the same biblical prose style and the same matter-of-fact treatment of extreme violence that he would develop into Blood Meridian — Child of God is shorter and more concentrated but equally harrowing. It was dismissed on publication and is now recognized as one of the essential McCarthy novels, his most formally radical early work.
Where to start
Child of God
Complete Child of God Book List
- 1Buy
Child of God
Cormac McCarthy·1973·The complete novel — approximately 200 pages, structured in three parts following Ballard's descent, the McCarthy title that most directly anticipates the Judge in Blood Meridian. - 2Buy
Outer Dark
Cormac McCarthy·1968·The preceding Southern gothic — the hill country incest story with the three tramps, the McCarthy novel that most directly precedes Child of God in style and geography. - 3Buy
Suttree
Cormac McCarthy·1979·The concluding Southern novel — Suttree on his houseboat in Knoxville, the most expansive and humane of the early McCarthy novels, essential reading after Child of God. - 4Buy
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy·1985·The Western masterpiece that Child of God leads to — the Judge as the most fully developed version of the evil that Child of God begins to sketch in Lester Ballard and in the three tramps of Outer Dark.
Child of God — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the significance of the title Child of God?
The title is McCarthy's ironic description of Lester Ballard — a creature of the same substance as all of us, as the novel says, made in God's image, a child of God much like yourself perhaps. The phrase first appears in the novel as a description of Ballard in the mouth of the county sheriff, and it is simultaneously an assertion of Ballard's common humanity (he is as much a child of God as anyone) and a meditation on what that claim means when applied to a man who has become a murderer and necrophile. McCarthy is interested in the theological question of what it means to say that all humans are children of God when humans are capable of what Ballard becomes.
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