The Best Cormac McCarthy Books to Read Right Now

Posted by Reinaldo Massengill on Wednesday, June 19, 2024

The late writer's final two novels cap off an inimitable and controversial career

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Cormac McCarthy, who died on Tuesday at the age of 89, is known for the dark and often merciless stories depicted in any of the dozen novels he wrote throughout his life.

McCarthy’s inimitable outlook on life was first introduced to the world with his 1965 debut “The Orchard Keeper,” but the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer didn’t enter the mainstream until the release of his later novels “All the Pretty Horses,” “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road,” the acclaimed film adaptations of which brought him a wide readership.

Biblical prose and grim themes run through all of McCarthy’s work, which is set in the American South and West. The MacArthur foundation, of which he was a fellow in 1981, hailed McCarthy’s stories as “distinctively American fiction in the southern gothic and epic western traditions.”

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Below, check out the best novels to begin your Cormac McCarthy journey — from the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Road” to his final two companion novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris.”

Blood Meridian

McCarthy’s relentlessly bloody 1985 Western is based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s. The book follows its teenager protagonist in Tennessee, where he becomes witness to a nightmarish world in which Indians are being murdered for their scalps. The late critic Harold Bloom wrote that “no other living American novelist … has given us a book as strong and memorable as ‘Blood Meridian.'”

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West$18.00 $7.15Buy Now On Amazon

The Passenger

McCarthy’s final books, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” released a year apart and 16 years after “The Road,” are vastly different than anything he’d ever published. However, you’d be mistaken to assume either of them are set in a cheerier place. “The Passenger” tells the tragic story of Bobby Western, a salvage diver, who is haunted by the loss of his sister Alicia, a troubled mathematical genius who died by suicide.

A companion novel, “Stella Maris,” focuses on Alicia, with a narrative that unfolds as dialogue between Alicia and her doctors at a psychiatric hospital in Wisconsin in 1972.

The Passenger$30.00 $15.68Buy Now On Amazon

The Road

“The Road,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 2007, is a brooding post-apocalyptic novel that details the grueling journey of a father and son as they travel over a landscape that’s been destroyed by some unspecified cataclysm. The novel was adapted into John Hillcoat’s 2009 film of the same name, with the screenplay written by McCarthy and Joe Penhall.

The Road$35.00 $19.99Buy Now On Amazon

No Country for Old Men

The violence-riddled “No Country for Old Men” is one of McCarthy’s most famous titles and widely considered one of his best. The book, originally written as a screenplay, follows a drug deal gone wrong when its Average Joe protagonist stumbles upon more than $2 million in a leather satchel in the Texas backcountry. The novel was then adapted into an indelible film by the Coen Brothers, which went on to win four Oscars including best picture.

No Country for Old Men$18.00 $11.31Buy Now On Amazon

Suttree

Although not his most widely read book, 1975’s “Suttree” is considered to be one of McCarthy’s greatest Southern novels. Having left behind a life of privilege with his prominent family, Cornelius Suttree lives in a dilapidated houseboat on a Tennessee river, spending his days fishing and mingling with the drunks and misfits trawling Knoxville’s seedy underbelly.

Suttree$18.00 $13.29Buy Now On Amazon

All the Pretty Horses

Adapted into the Matt Damon-starring film directed by Bill Bob Thornton, “All the Pretty Horses” is the first installment of McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy,” which also includes “The Crossing” and “Cities of the Plain.” The novel, which is considered one of McCarthy’s most accessible works, tells the story of John Grady Cole as he leaves Texas to live as a cowboy in Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. Along the way, he and Rawlins are beaten up and imprisoned, but even after his love leaves him, Cole never quite lets go of his cowboy optimism.

All the Pretty Horses$45.17Buy Now On Amazon

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