Set in mountainous Sevier County, Tennessee, "Child of God" is based on the third novel by acclaimed writer Cormac McCarthy, first published in 1973. It tells the strange story of Lester Ballard, a dispossessed, violent man whom the narrator describes as "a child of God much like yourself perhaps." Ballard's life is a disastrous attempt to exist outside the social order in the 1960s. Successively deprived of parents and homes and with few other ties, Ballard descends literally and figuratively to the level of a cave dweller as he falls deeper into crime and degradation.