Section I opens with Lester’s attempt to disrupt the auction of his family farm in Sevier County, Tennessee with verbal threats and gestures of his rifle, only to be foiled by a blow from behind with the blunt side of an axe.

The novel’s three sections are rather different in narrative stance, and through them McCarthy deftly manipulates response to Lester. And his treatment of Lester is more sympathetic than of comparable beyond-the-pale characters, Culla Holme in Outer Dark and the kid in Blood Meridian, perhaps to the reader’s discomfort. There are fewer graphic assaults on the reader’s imagination than in either Suttree or Blood Meridian. Yet McCarthy’s meditation on this lost soul is restrained, even delicate, in its images of his grievous acts. Its hero, Lester Ballard, is a murderer and necrophile, expelled from the human family and eventually living in underground caves, which he peoples with his trophies: giant stuffed animals won in carnival shooting galleries and the decomposing corpses of his several shot victims, male and female. Suspenseful, spare, a quick and compelling read, Child of God is at the same time McCarthy’s most extreme challenge to the limits of propriety, perhaps outdoing even Blood Meridian in its chronicling of individual depravity.

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