Cormac McCarthy - "Outer Dark"

Better just copy the blurb on the dust jacket: 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 and tells her he died of natural causes. Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander separately through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying and elusive strangers, headlong towards an eerie, apocalyptic resolution.

Beautiful but difficult.  The kind of book you have to read out loud at times to fully understand.  Seems a sibling of Nick Cave's "And the ass saw the angel".

    We don't get somebody directly we might ort to have a fire.

    I doubt they be much dry wood about.

    Well, maybe somebody be along directly.

    Yes.

    If it was Saturday, they'd be here. It's a sight in the world the traffic I get on a Saturday.

    What day is it? Holme said.

    I don't know, the ferryman said. It ain't Saturday.

    They sat in the grass and watched the river run in the dark as if something were expected there. Yes, said the ferryman. She is risin.

    Aye, said the blind man. It might be we'll meet again sometime.

    Holme raised a hand in inane farewell and set off down the road again. The blind man's cane softly tapping faded behind him. He went on, soundless with his naked feet, shambling, gracelorn, down out of the peaceful mazy fields, his toed tracks soft in the dust among the cratered shapes of horse and mule hoofs and before him under the high afternoon sun his shadow be-wandered in a dark parody of his progress. The road went on through a shadeless burn and for miles there were only the charred shapes of trees in a dead land where nothing moved save windy rifts of ash that rose dolorous and died again down the blackened corridors.

    Late in the day the road brought him into a swamp. And that was all. Before him stretched a spectral waste out of which reared only the naked trees in attitudes of agony and dimly hominoid like figures in a landscape of the damned. A faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth's curve. He tried his foot in the mire before him and rose in a vulvate welt claggy and sucking. He stepped back. A stale wind blew from this desolation and the marsh reeds and black ferns among which he stood clashed softly like things chained. He wondered why a road should come to such a place.

    Going back the way by which he came he met again the blind man tapping through the dusk. He waited very still by the side of the road, but the blind man passing turned his head and smiled upon him his blind smile. Hole watched him out of sight. He wondered where the blind man was going and did he know how the road ended. Someone should tell a blind man before setting him out that way.