Exploration of the Descent into Darkness of Lester Ballard

"Child of God" is a novel written by the author Cormac McCarthy. The book was published in 1974.

Lester Ballard's Descent

The protagonist is Lester Ballard. He is small, dirty, has a long beard, blood of Saxons and Celts flows in his veins, he moves in the wilderness with awkward ferocity, as if he were a fair. But in reality he is nothing more than a child of God like all of us, perhaps.
His is a progressive descent into hell, with no return, abandoning that residue of civilization that had belonged to him, disappointed and ghettoized, in a progressive isolation and symbiosis with the natural elements, after having lost the little he had. He will hide himself in a gloomy cave, forced to hunt for food and to live by expedients.

Serial Predator

It will be the beginning of a series of inexplicable and ferocious crimes, camouflaged in the horror he created himself, without a shred of "humanity" or a meaning other than that ferocity and that "evil" that suddenly springs from within but which is always part of himself and of the world.

Ballard will become a serial predator, implacable, mimetic, quick-change, necrophilic, lowered from the mountain like a hungry wolf, with anger, loneliness, revenge, death.

Rural Context of Tennessee

The outline, in that rural south of Tennessee where even the landscape is fierce and the abundant snow progressively reveals fights and death scenes, is a community that also feeds on violence and excesses, so "normal" that it becomes everyday life.