Cormac McCarthy

It seems impossible that Cormac McCarthy published his first book more than forty years ago. And even after ten novels, there may be no other American writer who has forged such an inimitable style (even if the Faulkner influence has always been apparent) and honed it to such a spare, violent vision of American history and myth. Even when he seemed to be working on a sort of auto-pilot in No Country for Old Men, his last novel, McCarthy was still capable of writing dark, tight rings around most of the competition. He’s been hurtling toward the apocalypse almost from the beginning of his career, and in The Road he finally gets there. A short, grim kick in the teeth, The Road finds McCarthy back in the terrifying, biblical, hair-shirt-wearing (and hair-raising) territory of Blood Meridian.