Outer Dark. by McCarthy, Cormac - 1968

New York: Random House, 1968. First edition of the author's second novel. Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed on the half-title page in a contemporary hand, "For John Markham With Best Wishes Cormac McCarthy." Fine in a fine 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).