Outer Dark

By: Cormac McCarthy

Narrated by: Ed Sala

Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves the baby in the woods and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong toward an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.

©1968 Cormac McCarthy (P)2013 Recorded Books

bleak chilling and dreadful consequence

Cormac mccarthy delivers something truly ghastly and horrific. Southern gothic terror and constant suffering. Very fitting narration and is best to experience this by listening while reading along.

Amazing & Powerful

Nothing brings you back to reality quite like a novel by Cormac McCarthy. My god, he is an incredible author. I hope he never stops writing.

Darkness clean through

Are you familiar with Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prarie? This book is a lot like that, if'n Pa had developed a serious meth habit.

Excellent, but...

I felt like I needed to shower while listening to get the grime of the words off of me. It was as though I was face down in the decaying mud of a bog listening.

I say that as a good thing. This is a vivid story, excellently voiced.

Dark & beautiful

Dark and incredibly beautiful and there couldn’t have been a better reader for this work. It’s perfection

Great, dark book

You know what you’re getting here. Deep and dark. Good reading and presented well. Incredible author.

Laugh out loud verbosity

CM makes the open road a claustrophobic coal black mineshaft where can be found everything in the universe dressed as nothing at all and punctuated with immense and sweeping run on sentences, each a work of fine art. Everything that happens is brutally real while also staged with repetition, metaphor, satire and profound surrealism. The performance was perfect and this would not be an easy one. If you like your fiction stark, vibrant, grim and literary, you can't beat Outer Dark.

A dark ride through an Appalachian Hell

Definitely not Cormac's best book, but an interesting one to read if you're a fan. The dark, haunting, complex prose style is there, but where this one falls short is in the story itself. The first 2/3rds have their moments but too often were a bit dull and not nearly the propulsive thrill ride that The Road or No Country are. Things do pick up in the last pages although they do take a dark turn even by his standards. I didn't love reading this book, but I still found it interesting because it's fun to watch the evolution of authors you love and to see the steps they took before they were masters.

It was dark.

This book is dark, real dark. I'm ok with dark, I really like McCarthy's work... but this book should come with a warning label.

Desolate.

Story begins and ends the same. A walk thru which we all avoid, praying grace and enlightenment.