Child of God (1973) is the third novel by American Pulitzer Prize–winning author Cormac McCarthy. Like McCarthy’s first two novels, Child of God is a Gothic horror set in Appalachia. The story follows the deterioration of 27-year-old Lester Ballard after he is violently dispossessed of his family farm and becomes a serial killer. Through Lester’s extreme isolation and moral corruption, McCarthy explores the themes of Fate in a World Without Grace, The Violence Inherent to Humanity, The Fear of Societal Breakdown, and the nature of free will.

This guide refers to the e-book version of the 1993 Vintage International Edition.

Content Warning: The source material references murder, death by suicide, rape, and necrophilia.

Plot Summary

In 1960s Sevier County, Tennessee, a crowd gathers for the auction of Lester Ballard’s farm, which the state seized for Lester’s failure to pay taxes. A small, unkempt man, Lester is the only surviving member of a family disliked for his grandfather’s association with the whitecaps, a vigilante group that terrorized the county in the 1890s. Lester’s neighbors believe his orphaning at the age of nine—his mother left him and his father died by suicide—unhinged him.

Lester threatens the crowd with a rifle and orders the auctioneer off his land, but he is knocked unconscious, and Sheriff Fate Turner carts him away. An outsider named John Greer buys Lester’s farm.

Unable to afford a place in town, Lester squats in a dilapidated cabin in the mountains. He begins spying on couples having sex in their cars on a popular lovers’ lane, the lookout on Frog Mountain.

Lester sometimes drinks with the dump keeper, Reubel, who abuses his daughters. Lester is infatuated with one of the daughters, but her wit flusters him. When he returns to the dump one day, he discovers that she has fled.

With the arrival of fall, Lester grows more solitary and bitter. At the Frog Mountain lookout, he finds an unconscious woman who has been raped. When she awakes, she attacks Lester, who hits her, snatches her nightgown, and leaves her naked in the cold. Following the woman’s accusation, Sheriff Turner arrests Lester for her rape instead of the two men responsible. Lester spends nine nights in jail before a judge dismisses his case. Outside the courthouse, the sheriff accuses Lester of planning a murder for his next crime.

At the county fair, Lester wins three giant stuffed animals at a shooting game before the attendant bans him. A natural dead shot, Lester has prized his rifle since he worked for the money to buy it as a child. In his cabin, he arranges the stuffed animals on his mattress. In spring, Lester gifts a live robin to a disabled boy named Billy Lane. When Billy chews off its legs, Lester anxiously defends the boy to his eldest sister, who predicted it would happen.

A year passes. In the winter, Lester, out hunting squirrels, finds a couple dead in a car at the Frog Mountain lookout. He has sex with the woman’s corpse before deciding to bring it back to his cabin. With money stolen from the car, he buys lingerie to dress up the woman’s body.

One night, Lester accidentally burns down the cabin. He saves his stuffed animals but finds no trace of the woman’s corpse. Now without a home, he moves into a cave farther in the mountains.

Lester begins going to his old farm and aiming his rifle through the window at John Greer. One day, the two meet on the road. Lester doesn’t look John in the eye and denies his identity when Greer calls him out.

Lester returns to the Lanes’ house and propositions Billy’s older sister. When she rebuffs him, Lester shoots her, takes her body, and sets the house aflame, leaving Billy to die. Days later, the sheriff brings Lester in for questioning at gunpoint. He doesn’t charge Lester but orders him to find another place to live.

Time passes, and the narrative returns to find that Lester has killed more women and stored their corpses in a cavern deep in the mountain cave system. Wearing the clothes and makeup of his victims, Lester visits John’s farm every day to spy on him. At the Frog Mountain lookout, Lester kills a couple. However, after he drags the woman’s corpse into the weeds, the car starts and the man, still alive, escapes down the road. Lester returns to his cave with the woman’s corpse. Meanwhile, Sheriff Turner investigates the disappearances of couples from Frog Mountain.

A long rainy period starts, flooding Sevier County and driving Lester from his cave. Moving his possessions across an engorged creek, Lester is knocked into rapids by a log. Though unable to swim, he thrashes his way to shore but loses his stuffed animals. Bedraggled and utterly defeated, he returns to the cave to transport the moldy corpses across the mountain to a sinkhole.

In flooded Sevierville, the sheriff and his deputy distribute the mail by boat. They give an old man named Mr. Wade a ride, and Wade tells the deputy the history of vigilantism in the county in the 1890s. He criticizes both groups, the White Caps and the Blue Bills, for their cowardice but praises the sheriff, Tom Davis, for ending vigilantism by publicly executing two whitecaps.

In spring, Lester sits alone high in the mountains, watching the world being reborn in the valley below. He hangs his head and cries. That night, he hears a sound from his childhood: the whistle of his father on his way home. The following day Lester sneaks up on John and shoots him. Wounded, John shoots back, severing Lester’s arm. John survives and Lester is taken to a hospital.

After some days in the hospital, a group of vigilantes abducts Lester and, under threat of death, forces him to take them to the bodies. Lester tricks them, leading them into the cave system he abandoned in the flood, and escapes through a fissure in the rock deeper into the caves. After three days, Lester finally finds another exit and returns to the hospital. On the way, he sees a child who looks exactly like him on a church bus.

Lester isn’t tried for any crime, but he is committed to a psychiatric hospital in Knoxville. After he dies of pneumonia, his body is dissected at a medical school. Sometime after Lester’s death, the sinkhole in which he stored the corpses opens up, swallowing a farmer’s mules. Sheriff Turner and his deputies haul out seven corpses, bind them in muslin, and transport them down into the valley as night falls.