Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

She slept through the first wan auguries of dawn, gently washed with river fog while martins came and went among the arches. Slept into the first heat of the day and woke to see toy birds with sesame eyes regarding her from their clay nests overhead. She rose and went to the river and washed her face and dried it with her hair. When she had gathered up the bundle of her belongings she emerged from beneath the bridge and set forth along the road gain. Emaciate and blinking with the wind among her rags she looked like something replevied by grim miracle from the ground and sent with tattered windings and halt corporeality into the agony of sunlight. Butterflies attended her and birds dusting in the road did not fly up when she passed. She hummed to herself as she went some child's song from an old dead time.

In a remote Appalachian cabin, a woman named Rinthy bears her brother's child. Her brother, Culla, takes the infant out to the forest and leaves it, telling Rinthy that it died. But the infant is saved by a passing tinker, whom Rinthy sets out to track down, first for her child's body, and then, learning the truth, the living child. Culla sets out after Rinthy, but he'll never find her again: their paths have diverged permanently. He wanders around the mountains, taking odd jobs where he can find them, narrowly avoiding the judgment of posses who find his shiftlessness suspicious. He's followed closely by three sinister men known only as "the Trio," who seem to be murdering those who cross Culla's path.

The Trio are the most Cormacesque element in Outer Dark. Anyone who's read Blood Meridian or The Road will see in them a kind of trial run at the frightening figures of those novels. It's tempting to see them as a kind of precursor to the Judge in Blood Meridian, but I don't think that's quite right. The Judge is a gnostic, an amoral killer, but the Trio are explicitly depicted as a kind of vengeful force, perhaps even a kind of justice. What's interesting about them is that the justice doesn't seem to be very well targeted: Culla first meets them face-to-face after escaping a horrible ferry accident that kills two other men and a horse. He meets the Trio at a campfire--where they are eating a meal of suspiciously unidentifiable meat--where they clearly suspect that Culla has killed the two men. They see his new boots and think them stolen, and in this they're partially right: he stole them, not from the ferryman or his client, but a rich squire--who, ironically, was later killed by the Trio! They know that Culla is guilty, but he's not quite guilty of what they say he is. Does that matter? And if the Trio is set on dispensing justice upon Culla, why is it that they kill everyone who comes into Culla's path but him?

There's a suggestion here, I think, especially when you consider the Biblical allusion of the title, of the idea of original sin, a fundamental evil that moves miasmically through existence and poisons everything. Culla's original sin is the impregnation of his sister and his attempted killing of the infant, and this poisons his path. Everyone he comes into contact with it is, in a sense, killed for it; but he himself will be punished for something else. And if original sin is something that's passed from one generation to another, it makes sense that the infant gets it worse--in a scene that prefigures the most horrifying moments of The Road, and which I will decline to describe.

Reading McCarthy's Southern Gothic novels, written before his move to the Southwest, reveal how much of Faulkner is in him. The flyblown language, the literal darkness of the primitive landscape, these seemed to me to be directly inspired by Faulkner's Mississippi. McCarthy's Appalachia is a primitive place--I think the word he'd use is atavistic--but the archaic language works here especially because it highlights a kind of timelessness to the narrative of sin and perdition. Blood Meridian and the Texas novels do that, too, but I also think they only makes sense in their historical context; they're novels of a particular kind of violence and conflict produced by the American frontier. Outer Dark, by contrast, has the out-of-time quality of a fable. It's a minor McCarthy, for sure, but I found a lot to appreciate in it.