No Country for Old Men

This is a Rubik’s cube of a Western. It feels so familiar in terms of its Western iconography and stock characters and motifs, but McCarthy twists the familiar tropes of the popular Western into bizarre and inscrutable patterns.

It’s a book I want to figure out but can’t quite, and that’s why I have re-read it several times. With each read, I’m confronted with a new puzzle just when I thought I had cracked its code. 

McCarthy’s writing is always brutal yet beautiful, and I think this is his best work.

Often, his characters are so chilling that they don’t seem quite human, with an almost sci-fi aura. The horrifying villain in this book is incredibly compelling, with an intelligence that transcends his robot-like demeanor with dark humor. That’s probably why he translated so well to the film version of this book.

I’m a sucker for great stories well-told. My criteria are simple: ignore the tropes, genres, and categories and read the words. It’s up to the author’s prose to keep me engaged until I’m immersed in the story. In most books, I don’t get past page one. Cormac McCarthy nails it with his opening line: “I sent one boy to the gas chamber at Huntsville.”  How could I resist?

True, the Cohen Brothers' film adaptation is one of my favorites, as are a few of their movies. While the adaptation follows the book closely, the dark humor overlay of the Cohen… show more.

Anton Chigurh is, without a doubt, one of the most disturbing and driven killers in any book I have ever read. The story has a slow burn that drags you along a path that can only have one destination, and still, you want to walk it.

Unlike in the movie, we are given a backstory about the sheriff, which makes his decisions much more understandable, making him much less just a narrator.

McCarthy was not a fan of speech marks or excessive punctuation. Still, I found that this just focused my attention, breathlessly, upon the action, and after the first… show more.

This book is Cormac McCarthy’s most accessible novel. It reads like a screenplay and hits all of the high spots with low blows and grit. It is political, involving drug deals gone wrong that involve Mexican cartels while also being absolutely lonely and isolated. This is noir in the bright desert daylight, mixed with some high-tech of modern criminals. Dark, terrible, and entertaining.

Once the movie came out and I viewed it twice, I had to have the book. Now that I have it, I’ve read it twice as well. Cormac McCarthy has written a gem. A genius storyteller, his villain grips you with the way he so ruthfully takes people out while pursuing his lost drug money. Regardless of where you’re from, you’ll find this tale of Texas and it’s border with Mexico intriguing, desolate, and frightening when McCarthy’s characters go full-tilt with no mercy in mind. It’s all about an innocent find of two million dollars and what an impossible task… show more.

No Country for Old Men is a hard-boiled, new wave western that takes place on the Texas side of the U.S. border. Imagine a fast, violent story about a stone-cold killer (Chigurh), a small-town sheriff (Bell), and an average Joe who stumbles across a leather case filled with $2 million in hot drug money (Moss). Of course, the cartels want their money back and so the hunter and the hunted are catapulted into a nightmarish world of drugs, money, and death. McCarthy turns the elaborate cat-and-mouse game played by Moss, Chigurh, and Bell into a harrowing, non-stop drama, cutting from… show more.

A man finds money. The cartels want it back. If anyone but Cormac McCarthy wrote it, it would be a played-out concept, but because Cormac McCarthy wrote it, it cores you out like a mealy apple and leaves a hole in you for life to fill with lessons. There is a western noir quality to this novel that is ruthless and poetic and unforgettable. He builds this despotic world full of all the different kinds of evil and you just sit there with your jaw in your lap and watch it tear itself apart. Beautiful.

This too is a novel about a young man being pursued by a remorseless killer. I enjoyed this novel because of its unrelenting suspense and because it represents a struggle, not only for the soul of a young man but for that of the nation. In it, McCarthy gives us a stunning portrait of evil and he shows us what’s at stake. The language is stripped bare, making the story resemble an actual direct experience as opposed to something I was merely reading about in the comfort of home.