Nightmarish Narrative Logic

Edwin T. Arnold's apt comment on the nightmarish narrative logic of Outer Dark:

This story seems derived from the world of folklore or dream, peopled as it often is by mysterious denizens and ruled by some nightmare logic which makes one question at what level of reality the story operates.

Stone Figures Quarried from the Architecture of an Older Time

It was late afternoon when they set forth again, out from the town, the wheels rasping in the sand, back down the yellow road. Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen near mute with dew.

On their chairs in such black immobility these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.

–Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark, 77.

Strung Out in Silhouette Against the Sun

The first sentence of Outer Dark (which I think sets the tone and ethos of the narrative that follows):

THEY CRESTED OUT on the bluff in the late afternoon sun with their shadows long on the sawgrass and burnt sedge, moving single file and slowly high above the river and with something of its own implacability, pausing and grouping for a moment and going on again strung out in silhouette against the sun and then dropping under the crest of the hill into a fold of blue shadow with light touching them about the head in spurious sanctity until they had gone on for such a time as saw the sun down altogether and they moved in shadow altogether which suited them very well.

–Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark, 4. Capitalization and emphasis in the original typography.

Ad for Cormac McCarthy's "New" Novel

From an ad that ran in the New York Times on September 26, 1986:

Commentary from the NYT:

Cormac McCarthy's second novel, “Outer Dark,” is a grim, desolate piece of fiction. It's a grinding story about a woman, Rinthy, who bears her brother's baby, only to have him leave the infant in the woods to die. You don't get a sense of the novel's dark subject matter in this perky advertisement, though. It focuses instead on McCarthy's rugged good looks (he was 35 at the time), and even “pops” his head, giving this ad an ironic, cheerful, proto-Spy magazine feel. The blurbs, mostly from Midwestern book sections, are cliché-strewn even by book-ad standards.

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