When Early Landry loses his wife in a small town in Mississippi, his sister makes the decision for him to move with her to Los Angeles, where Early moves into an apartment building filled with a group of interesting Hollywood people, nothing he has ever been used to, but perhaps he fits in well.

Set in mountainous Sevier County, Tennessee, Child of God tells the 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. 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.