Let’s look at some prose this week:

The yellow trees on the mountain subsided into yellow and flame and to ultimate nakedness. An early winter fell, a cold wind sucked among the black and barren branches. Alone in the empty shell of a house the squatter watched through the moteblown glass a rimshard of bonecolored moon come cradling up over the black balsams on the ridge, ink trees a facile hand had sketched against the paler dark of winter heavens.

January 2008 at the college bookstore. I was thinking about adding another class, when  I spotted Child of God on the bookshelf.

I’d found my new class.

I had read The Road the year before, which I discovered through the old Rudius Media Writing Forum (and isn’t a shame that place shut down? Now we’re stuck with the Absolute Write funhouse), and that book made me a huge Cormac McCarthy fan. I don’t like all his books — Cities of the Plain was awful, and I never finished The Crossing — but when he gets it right, he gets it right.

Here’s one more from Child of God. Because why not?

And you could see among the faces a young girl with candyapple on her lips and her eyes wide. Her pale hair smelled of soap, womanchild from beyond the years, rapt below the sulphur glow and pitchlight of some medieval fun fair. A lean skylong candle skewered the black pools in her eyes. Her fingers clutched. In the flood of this breaking brimstone galaxy she saw the man with the bears watching her and she edged closer to the girl by her side and brushed her hair with two fingers quickly.

On a related note, it seems Christmas is coming early in 2016.