Reading Order
Outer Dark Reading Order
Outer Dark (1968) by Cormac McCarthy is his second novel and his first fully realized Southern Gothic work — the story of Rinthy Holme, a young woman in an Appalachian setting of indeterminate time, searching for the infant son she bore from a relationship with her brother Culla, whom Culla abandoned in the woods to die. The novel follows two parallel journeys: Rinthy's search across the countryside for her child, asking at every farmhouse if they have seen a baby; and Culla's journey, pursued by three nameless, violent men who seem to be agents of a cosmic punishment, killing everyone Culla encounters. Outer Dark is McCarthy's entry point into the Southern Gothic tradition of Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor — the Appalachian landscape is dark and timeless, the violence is biblical in its quality (the three men are McCarthy's first version of the judgment figures who will culminate in the Judge in Blood Meridian and Chigurh in No Country for Old Men), and the novel's final image is one of the most haunting in American fiction. It is not McCarthy's most accessible novel, but it is the earliest clear statement of his central concerns: violence as a cosmic force, the landscape as a moral condition, and the question of whether guilt can be escaped.
Where to start
Outer Dark — any Vintage International paperback. McCarthy's second novel and the earliest example of his mature style; shorter than most of his major novels (under 250 pages) and readable in a single sitting, though not easily forgotten.
Complete Outer Dark Book List
- 1Buy
Outer Dark
Cormac McCarthy·1968·The novel — Rinthy's search for her child, Culla's journey pursued by three violent men, and the Appalachian Gothic landscape; McCarthy's second novel and his first fully realized Southern Gothic work; the earliest statement of his major concerns. - 2Buy
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy·1985·McCarthy's masterpiece — the essential companion; the Judge is the three men of Outer Dark at their fullest mythological development, and Blood Meridian's violence and cosmological scope are what Outer Dark's compressed darkness is working toward. - 3Buy
Suttree
Cormac McCarthy·1979·McCarthy's most personal and lyrical novel — published eleven years after Outer Dark, the companion in his Southern/Appalachian mode; Suttree's warmth is the other side of what Outer Dark's darkness shows about McCarthy's range in his Southern period. - 4Buy
Child of God
Cormac McCarthy·1973·McCarthy's third novel — the companion in his early Appalachian Gothic mode; Lester Ballard's descent into violence is the more extreme version of the Southern Gothic that Outer Dark inaugurates. - 5Buy
Wise Blood
Flannery O'Connor·1952·O'Connor's Southern Gothic novel — the most important predecessor; Hazel Motes's self-blinding and his Church of Christ Without Christ is the Southern Gothic tradition Outer Dark directly inherits; the three men pursuing Culla are O'Connor's grotesque judgment figures in McCarthy's stripped-down mode. - 6Buy
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner·1930·Faulkner's darkly comic masterpiece — the formal predecessor in Southern American fiction; the Bundren family's journey across Mississippi with Addie's coffin is the comic/tragic version of the journey-across-landscape narrative that Outer Dark gives in a Gothic register. - 7Buy
The Hamlet
William Faulkner·1940·Faulkner's Snopes trilogy opener — the companion in Southern fiction about Appalachian poverty, violence, and grotesque social conditions; the Flem Snopes world of Frenchman's Bend is the Yoknapatawpha counterpart to Outer Dark's timeless Appalachian landscape. - 8Buy
No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy·2005·McCarthy's most accessible major novel — the companion in his meditation on judgment and violence; Chigurh is the contemporary, formally conventional version of Outer Dark's three nameless men, the same figure in a very different formal register.
Outer Dark — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Outer Dark about?
Outer Dark is set in Appalachian America at an indeterminate time (the nineteenth or early twentieth century) and follows two parallel journeys. Rinthy Holme has given birth to a child fathered by her brother Culla; Culla tells her the child died, but he has actually abandoned it in the woods. The child survives — it is found by a tinker — and Rinthy sets out to find it, walking from farm to farm, asking after a baby, sustained by what seems like a maternal instinct that transcends what she knows. Culla, meanwhile, is pursued across the same landscape by three nameless men — a leader, a fair-haired man, and a mute — who seem to appear wherever Culla goes and who kill everyone around him. The novel ends with the three men's last act and Culla in a swamp, arrived at a road that goes nowhere.
Who are the three men and what do they represent?
The three men — a leader, a fair-haired man, and a mute — are McCarthy's first version of the judgment figure that will develop into the Judge in Blood Meridian and Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. They have no explained origin, they appear where Culla appears, and they kill everyone around him — not him, but the people he encounters. They are not identified as angels or demons, they are not explained, and McCarthy refuses to give them any origin or motivation. They represent, in the most compressed form, McCarthy's argument that violence is not a human choice but a cosmic condition — that some people carry destruction with them not because they are violent but because their guilt has put them in the path of something that does not ask permission.
What is the novel's relationship to the Southern Gothic tradition?
Outer Dark is clearly in the Southern Gothic tradition of Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor: the landscape is dark and oppressive, the incest and poverty are treated as conditions of the world rather than aberrations, the violence has a biblical quality, and the characters are trapped in situations from which there is no escape through conventional means. O'Connor is the most important predecessor: her grotesque judgment figures (the Misfit in 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find,' the travelling Bible salesman in 'Good Country People') are the direct ancestors of McCarthy's three men. But where O'Connor's grotesques are in the service of a Catholic theology of grace, McCarthy's have no theological redemption on offer — the landscape offers no grace, and the violence is not instructive.
How does Outer Dark relate to McCarthy's later work?
Outer Dark is the earliest clear statement of the concerns that McCarthy develops across his career. The three men are the earliest version of the judgment figure that becomes the Judge in Blood Meridian and Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. The Appalachian landscape as a moral condition — dark, indifferent, saturated with violence — is the earliest version of the desert landscape that becomes the border in the Border Trilogy. The question of whether guilt can be escaped is the question that Blood Meridian, No Country, and The Road all ask in different registers. Outer Dark is the compressed, earliest statement of the concerns that McCarthy's major novels develop at greater length and ambition.
What should I read after Outer Dark?
After Outer Dark, Child of God (1973) is the companion in McCarthy's early Appalachian Gothic mode — more extreme in its subject matter (Lester Ballard's descent into violence) but in the same landscape and register. Suttree (1979) is the more lyrical, warm companion in his Southern mode. Blood Meridian (1985) is the essential companion — the three men's descendants at their mythological fullest. For the Southern Gothic tradition Outer Dark belongs to, Flannery O'Connor's collected stories and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury are the most important predecessors.
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