Child of God was Cormac McCarthy’s third novel. It’s a crime story featuring horrific murders, necrophilia, and a character entirely detached from human feeling, other than his own desires. McCarthy’s prose is typically sparse, capturing the cadence of his characters’ speech and the bleak winter of Sevier County, Tennessee. Its repressed tone suits the air of menace and contributes to the tension. The novel may be a good introduction to McCarthy’s style due to its brevity, and a gateway into other more mature works like Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men. In fact, the narrative style of Child of God seems to anticipate that later novel. Child of God is narrated by a police officer, John Cotton, who has known Ballard’s father and has seen enough to understand that Ballard – his deeds and what we might call evil – stands out from the usual roll call of human depravity: “goddam if he didn’t outstrip em all”.

Lester Ballard is twenty-seven years old. As the novel begins we discover that his house has been taken from him by the County – we’re not sure why although it is likely he had only been a squatter – and is in the process of being auctioned, even as he stands there making threats, the kind which has already seen him do a short stint in jail. He is angry and embittered. The sale technically leaves him homeless, although Ballard will soon find another house to squat in. Other than that, we know little about Ballard. His father hanged himself when Ballard was a child, and Ballard has had a reputation as a bully while growing up. But Ballard has other proclivities which would make us shudder if we met him in life.

In fact, Cormac McCarthy hinted that Ballard was based on a real person and an historical crime. He never confirmed which crime, but it is widely believed he based aspects of this novel on the Lula Lake murders in 1963, committed ten years prior to the first publication of Child of God. Nineteen year old Orville Steele and sixteen year old Carolyn Newell from Rossville, Georgia, had gone to Lula Lake, a secluded spot where young lovers frequented. They didn’t return home. Their bodies were found separately five days later, each bound. Carolyn Newell had been repeatedly raped. Both had been strangled. Twenty-seven year old James Melvin Blevins (the same age as Ballard) was arrested for the crimes. However, Blevins was also married with children while Ballard is a loner. Nevertheless, Blevins had a reputation for watching young couples having sex in remote locations. He was eventually acquitted for technical legal reasons around the conduct of the trial.

There is another interesting real-life association with the McCarthy’s story. Ed Gein, known as the Butcher of Plainfield or the Plainfield Ghoul, was a murderer, possibly a serial killer, and was also known to have dug up the fresh corpses – particularly those of middle-aged women – from cemeteries. He is said to have been an inspiration for the character of Norman Bates, but his proclivity for making clothes, wigs and even furniture from the bodies of his victims suggests he was a strong inspiration for Thomas Harris’s Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs. Gein was eventually assigned to a mental institution, where he died.

Neither of these historical criminals describes Lester Ballard entirely, but his own crimes and proclivities can be guessed by conflating aspects of each. There is no need to describe the plot of the novel or Ballard’s crimes in any detail. They need to be discovered fresh upon a first reading. There is a pornographic quality to the detail of the crimes. But McCarthy’s writing does not descend into prurient detail for its own sake. Ballard’s actions should repel us rather than titillate: horrify rather than intrigue. And McCarthy’s treatment of his subject lifts his narrative well beyond the salacious and the tantalising promises of True Crime. We enter Ballard’s world, enter his mind, and are subject to his cold calculations and justifications. We feel the creeping logic of his need and understand the power and control that killing confers. This is a psychological thriller as much as anything.

However, the true import of the novel is achieved by the way that McCarthy contextualises Ballard. Ballard is a man increasingly estranged from his humanity. Reduced to living in a cave in the woods, we are reminded of him in another scene as a bear flees for its life, pursued by dogs. Wild dogs also invade the house Ballard is living in, and he fights them off viciously. He steals chickens and eggs from Greer, the man who brought his old home, like a fox, but it is Mr Fox who guards his own interests against Ballard when he refuses to extend his credit. This short novel is also peppered with stories of animals exploited or mistreated by humans: pigeons with live firecrackers in their anus; an ape pressed into the service of a betting syndicate, made to box men. There is a cruel, transactional quality in the human world which has left Ballard behind in the everyday practical purposes of life. Mr Fox’s refusal of credit to Ballard speaks to the loss and failure of Lester Ballard’s life: “. . . in twenty-seven years you’ve managed to accumulate four dollars and nineteen cents”, he says contemptuously.

But there is also an historical context of cruelty, racism and murder to which the title, Child of God, ironically alludes. Upon our first seeing Ballard standing by a barn door, waiting for his house to be auctioned, the narrator describes him as, “A child of God much like yourself perhaps.” McCarthy’s stories are mythic in their scope, and this is achieved through its religious allusions. There are small details like the fact that the Sheriff of Sevier County is called Fate. More broadly, we might read Ballard as a Caine figure, outcast from humanity for his crime. But the title suggests that Ballard is not born a monster: that he possesses God’s grace like anyone else. This is the mystery at the heart of the novel: how we reconcile such monstrous actions as Ballard’s within a Christian paradigm. Later, Sheriff Fate and his Deputy, Cotton, speak to an old man, Wade, who remembers an earlier period when the White Caps were influential in their area. The White Caps began as groups of farmers who used extra-legal means to enforce the law and morality in their areas. But the movement degenerated into violence and murder, and during the Civil War took on more racist tones with actions taken against Negroes. Cotton, reflecting upon the White Caps and Civil War, asks Wade, “You think people was meaner then than they are now?” Wade’s response is unsettling: “I think people are the same from the day God first made one.”

With this evaluation, McCarthy’s protagonist isn’t an aberration. He is one of us, a ‘child of God’ according to the tenets of these Southern men. Part of America’s history is a story of people who have acted badly – collectively – on the basis of ideology and belief. But Ballard is something different. He has been cut loose. Adrift, he has little to restrain him, and nothing to guide him except his own desires. Only that McCarthy provides an historical context, we might read this as a morality tale, of a man’s loss of God and his terrible fall. But this is a modern tale, published towards the end of the Vietnam War. Ballard’s experience speaks of the alienating experience of modernity and capitalism, and suggests an unsettling insight, that Ballard is not so different in his basic humanity to us.

Child of God is a powerful novel which is short enough that it can be read in an afternoon. I’ve tried to say as little about the actual story as possible. It really is a story to discover on your own. Highly recommended.