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Cormac McCarthy

Outer Dark

ACCLAIM FOR CORMAC MCCARTHY

“[McCarthy] is a very fine writer — one of our best. ”

— Peter Matthiessen

“Cormac McCarthy’s supple and stunning language, the breadth in his characters, his sense of the physicality of the landscape, an evocation of biblical themes to which he is equal, and a pure gift for conveyance distinguish him as a contemporary writer almost without equal. ”

— Barry Lopez

“[McCarthy] puts most other American writers to shame. [His] work itself repays the tight focus of his attention with its finely wrought craftsmanship and its ferocious energy. ”

— The New York Times Book Review

“No other novelist in America seems to have looked the work of Faulkner in the eye without blinking and lived to write in his spirit without sounding like a parody of the master. ”

— Dallas Morning News

“McCarthy is a writer to be read, to be admired, and quite honestly — envied. ”

— Ralph Ellison

OUTER DARK

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. When they reached the river it was full dark and they made camp and a small fire across which their shapes moved in a nameless black ballet. They cooked whatever it was they had with them in whatever crude vessels and turned in to sleep, sprawled on the packed mud full clothed with their mouths gaped to the stars. They were about with the first light, the bearded one rising and kicking out the other two and still with no word among them rekindling the fire and setting their battered pannikins about it, squatting on their haunches, eating again wordlessly with beltknives, until the bearded one rose and stood spraddlelegged before the fire and closed the other two in a foul white plume of smoke out of and through which they fought suddenly and unannounced and mute and as suddenly ceased, picking up their ragged duffel and moving west along the river once again.