Books

New York: Random House, 1968. First edition of the author's second novel. Octavo, original half cloth. Boldly signed by Cormac McCarthy on the front free endpaper. Fine in a near fine price-clipped dust jacket. Jacket design by Muriel Nasser. A superior example. Outer Dark is a novel at once mythic and starkly evocative, set in an unspecified place in Appalachia sometime around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; the brother 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. "A profound parable that ultimately speaks to any society in any time" (Time).

Outer Dark is a novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 1968. It tells the story of a woman named Rinthy who gives birth to her brother's child and the subsequent events that unfold as they drift separately through an unforgiving landscape. The novel is noted for its explorations of human morality and its stark and lyrical prose.