By Cormac Mc Carthy the author of the critically acclaimed Border Trilogy Outer Dark is a novel at once mythic & 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 & tells her he died of natural causes Discovering her brother's lie she sets forth alone to find her son Both brother & sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying & elusive strangers headlong toward an eerie apocalyptic resolution