Like its predecessor Outer Dark (1968), Child of God established McCarthy's interest in using extreme isolation, perversity, and violence to represent human experience.

McCarthy ignores literary conventions – for example, he does not use quotation marks – and switches between several styles of writing such as matter-of-fact descriptions, extremely detailed prose, vivid and picturesque pastoral imagery, and colloquial first-person narration (with the speaker remaining unidentified).

Now homeless, Ballard begins squatting in an abandoned two-room cabin and voyeuristically spying on young couples in their cars near the Frog Mountain turnaround.

In the spring of the same year, a farmer's plow falls into a sinkhole in Sevier County, revealing a cavernous chamber containing the bodies of seven of Ballard's victims.

Ballard, who the novel makes clear is unable to have conventional romantic relationships, eventually descends into necrophilia after finding a dead couple in a car.

As society pushes Ballard further and further into a corner, he degenerates into a barbaric survivalist, living in a cave, stealing food, and deviously escaping after he is captured by a group of vengeful men.

Much like McCarthy's later novel Blood Meridian, the novel explores the nature of cruelty, depicting violence as an eternal driving force of humanity:He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank.

Or rather, why will not these waters take him?This passage bears a striking resemblance to the closing pages of Blood Meridian, wherein Judge Holden declares that war is beautiful, comparing it to dance.

That novel's main text ends with the judge in the center of a barroom, rallying the raucous men around him with a performance: "He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite.

[3] Despite its surreal focus, Child of God contains much unobtrusive historical detail about Sevier County, Tennessee, including references to local Ku Klux Klan-like vigilante groups of the 1890s known as White Caps and Bluebills.

In October 2007, Child of God found itself at the center of a teaching controversy at Jim Ned High School in Tuscola, Texas.

Kaleb Tierce, the Advanced Placement English teacher and coach at Jim Ned, assigned a book report for which a 14-year-old student selected this title.

The website's critical consensus states: "An obviously reverent adaptation that fails to make a case for the source material being turned into a movie, Child of God finds director James Franco outmatched by Cormac McCarthy's novel.