Child of God

In the first pages, while the county gathers on a Tennessee hillside to auction off his father's place, McCarthy sets down the sentence the whole book exists to test: "A child of God much like yourself perhaps." Lester Ballard watches from the barn door, small and unshaven, and from there he only goes down: out of the house he was born in, into a derelict cabin, at last into the limestone caves beneath the mountain, hauling a rifle, a bundle of stuffed animals won at a fairground shooting gallery, and the dead he has made. The book never flinches from the fact.