Three by McCarthy - Cormac McCarthy

Written by Cormac McCarthy
Read by Tom Stechschulte, Ed Sala, Richard Poe
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Child of God (1973)
Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
Release date: December 7, 2012
Duration: 03:41:25

All books listed as Vintage International

In this taut, chilling novel, Lester Ballard—a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape—haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail. While telling his story, Cormac McCarthy depicts the most sordid aspects of life with dignity, humor, and characteristic lyrical brilliance.

Set in Tennessee in the 1960s, this chilling novel sees Lester Ballard become increasingly isolated from society. After taking a deceased woman as a girlfriend, he “saves her” from a fire - and his life spirals into deepening depravity.

Outer Dark (1968)
Narrated by: Ed Sala
Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
Release date: April 5, 2013
Duration: 07:10:26

Outer Dark is a novel at once a fable 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.

The Crossing (1994)
Narrated by: Richard Poe
Series: Border Trilogy, Book 2
Length: 14 hrs and 41 min
Release date: 02-29-16
Publisher: Recorded Books

Following All the Pretty Horses in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy is a novel whose force of language is matched only by its breadth of experience and depth of thought.

In the late 1930s, 16-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family’s ranch. But instead of killing it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico.

In the boot heel of New Mexico hard on the frontier, Billy and Boyd Parham are just boys in the years before the Second World War, but on the cusp of unimaginable events. First comes a trespassing Indian and the dream of wolves running wild amongst the cattle lately brought onto the plain by settlers — this when all the wisdom of trappers has disappeared along with the trappers themselves. And so Billy sets forth at the age of sixteen on an unwitting journey into the souls of boys and animals and men. Having trapped a she-wolf he would restore to the mountains of Mexico, he is long gone and returns to find everything he left behind transformed utterly in his absence. Except his kid brother, Boyd, with whom he strikes out yet again to reclaim what is theirs thus crossing into “that antique gaze from whence there could be no way back forever.”

An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous and appalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart and mind at once.