“Story of a Boy and Goatherd a Tale of Violence with an Odd Beauty”
The story is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic novel “The Road,” where a boy and his father trudge across a vast wasteland. But Carrasco’s central characters are a young boy and an old man who herds goats. They journey across an arid land, destroyed by a terrible drought, not the unnamed disaster of “The Road.” The drought seems to have devastated the entire world, not just the boy’s village. Carrasco’s story is full of violence and religious references like McCarthy’s work, but the archaic or biblical vocabulary and cadence of McCarthy’s prose is absent here. The evil of Carrasco’s bailiff nearly matches McCarthy’s Judge Holden in Blood Meridian.
You can read my review of Out in the Open in the July 23, 2017, edition of the News & Observer, by clicking the image below.
You can buy Out in the Open at at Barnes & Noble
