Cormac McCarthy's nightmarish novel, Outer Dark is a grim and unsettling tale about a brother and sister, Culla and Rinthy Holme, who live in remote and rarely visited country. It begins with Rinthy going into labour with, as becomes clear, an incestuously conceived baby. A tinker arrives outside, pulling his cart of goods and Culla rushes outside to send him away.

I don't know why dark stories like this make good subjects for drawing from imagination, but McCarthy's imagery is certainly vivid. Here's the scene, drawn with charcoal pencil.

​'When the tinker came rattling his cart in drunken charivari through the clearing he was there with wild arms like one fending back a curse. The tinker looked up, a small gnomic figure ... watching him with bland gray eyes.
Sickness here, he called. Got sickness.
The tinker halted and lowered the shafts to the ground ... What kind? he said.'
(McCarthy doesn't use speech quotation marks.)

The siblings Culla and Rinthy each go their own separate way on journeys across the land, by foot. Three devilish figures, never fully explained, follow Culla, bringing murderous havoc in his wake. (I said it's nightmarish.)
In one scene they appear at night and steal farming implements from a farm where Culla has found temporary work.

'They entered the lot at a slow jog, the peaceful and ruminative stock coming erect, watchful, shifting with eyes sidled as they passed, the three of them paying no heed ... passing through the open doors of the barn and almost instantly out the other side marvelously armed with crude agrarian weapons, spade and brush-hook...'

​Rinthy Holme wanders the country, carrying a bundle of clothes under her arm. As she passes 'rows of new corn putting up handhigh through the gray loam', something halts her.

'If crows had not risen from a field she might never have looked that way to see two hanged men in a tree like gross chimes.'

While looking for work, Culla Holme is told to dig two graves, not in the church yard, but outside it. When he arrives, two men are in the church yard, one digging, the other watching.

'You sure you diggin in the right place?
Yessir, the seated one said.
You ain't diggin two are you?
Yessir. I just waitin on him a minute.
Where's the other one?
They ain't but just us.
Holme looked at them blankly. Where's the other hole at? he said.'

During his wanderings, Culla Holme encounters a huge herd of hogs being driven across the country. He climbs a rock to watch and sees the herd stampede and rush over a cliff edge. One of the drovers is swept away to his death.

'The drover ... swept past with bowed back and hands aloft, a limp and ragged scarecrow flailing briefly in that rabid freeze...'