film-of-the-book update : 
 None other than James (I'm handsome and I can do anything) Franco directed a version of this last year & I just saw it; and - damn, James, I hate to say this but - it was really good! And faithful! Really great performance by Scott Haze as Lester. You probably shouldn't watch it while you eat your tea nor should you be watching it with any elderly relatives but if you know what the story is about you probably would not do that. Unless you want to kill them off with shock and horror. This time round I spotted that Child of God starts just like Omensetter's Luck, with a rural auction. Kind of a really useless fact. 
 And now the actual review. 
 ME AND CORMAC, WE GO BACK A LONG WAY. 
 This was a re-read, my first for years, and once again I loved Cormac's outrageous, daring style. I gave it five stars all those years ago and I give it five now. I felt again that I was in the presence of a writer who could dip all the other American writers in his Weetabix and mush em all together and eat em up and go for another bowl of em. This guy is the real deal. Well allright! So how come I didn't like any other CMcC book if he's such a wow? Good question, you know. I had a go at "Blood Meridian", and as everyone knows, that's like reading the Bible if God was Sam Peckinpah. Beautiful beautiful writing completely squandered on an endurance-test Western with zero story and zero character. So I failed there. "All the Pretty Horses" - well, that was better, and I did finish it, but by now Cormac's style has got ever more outre, he's much more deeply in love with the conjunction and and by then he'd got too mythtastic for my taste. I still like my soap-opera, thank you, I'm just this suburban gentleman in a semi-detatched house with a cat and a bottle of real ale and a High Llamas cd. Myths? Not so much. So I think Cormac and me had a parting of the ways. But if I recall right, before we bade farewell and he took the road west, we shook hands cordially. It felt cordial, that is, although his face betrayed no expression. 
 THIS WILL MELT YOUR FACE 
 As to "Child of God" - this book is a total treat, but I got to warn you, the main character is a little unsavoury. Lester Ballard, our grisly necrophile protagonist, has quite a bit of the old Ed Gein about him. Which if so would make him the fourth fictional incarnation of Ed, so inspirational was he, and that is leaving aside the biopic about him, which is called "Ed Gein". There was Hitchcock's Psycho, there was ol' Leatherface in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" (was ever a film so aptly titled - it was in Texas, there was a massacre, it was done with a chainsaw) and there was the regrettable Buffalo Bill in "The Silence of the Tiny Little Baa-Lambs" with his human skin dresses. Now Barbara Gowdy, in her arresting story "We So Seldom Look On Love", makes a case that there are indeed true necrophiles, people that only love people if they're dead. (Imagine the fate of a necrophile who's looking for commitment! I guess the only solution there would be taxidermy.) But I argue that the great majority of necrophiles wind up with the dead through poor lifestyle choice and low self esteem. They are just lonely. But in a special way. You and me, we may have been through lonely times, you may still be going through those times, and I only wish I could reach my hand through this screen and give your shoulder a little squeeze, wouldn't that be nice, hmm, maybe it wouldn't, can you imagine if you booted up your computer and all these arms came out, wiggling around? Doesn't bear thinking about - I digress - this loneliness that we have suffered was still on the planet Earth, it was a recognisable, common emotion. We could have been rescued at any time. These necrophiles though, the loneliness of these guys is a cold cold moon of Pluto. They are off the scale of ordinary inabilities to communicate, to invite affection, they are the antimatter of human dalliance. They make autists look like quiz-show comperes. The only date they've been on is where they shoot em in the back of the head and lug em home. That's a date. Of sorts. Now Lester Ballard, if he could only of met a nice girl some time in his early life and could of settled down somewhat, it may have been the making of him. But he never met the right gal. And he took the wrong turn in life. The way it goes sometimes.