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Cormac McCarthy Message Board 1/1/2012
Talk about the novels, new and used books that McCarthy has written!

Author McCarthy's Book Reviews

All the Pretty Horses
After his grandfather's death, his parent's divorce and the loss of the family ranch, John Grady Cole decides to leave his world behind and cross the border into Mexico with his friend Lacey Rawlins. While still in Texas the boys run into another traveler--Jimmy Blevins, a scrawny kid on a stolen horse--and reluctantly take him in. The three cross the Rio Grande into Mexico, looking for work and a new life. The boys soon get into trouble a...
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
In the 1840's a governor offered $50 per native american scalp. Groups of bandits formed, riding throught the west, murdering and scalping native americans. Into this world comes the protagonist, known only as "the kid". The kid is a fourteen year old boy who has run away from his father, and set off on his own. He joins the gang, but it is clear that he doesn't fit in with them. He has a quality which the other members of the gang lack: mercy. This capt...
Child of God
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy tells the tale of Lester Ballard, a sociopathic man who, after being falsely accused of rape, attempts to live his fractured life on the fringes of society, wandering the hill country of Eastern Tennessee. The novel is separated into three sections, each of which details Lester's fallout from the established social order. In part one, Ballard's ancestral home is put up for auction; he threatens to shoot the auctioneer,...
Cities of the Plain
John Grady Cole, who works on a ranch in New Mexico in the 1950s, falls in love with a young prostitute, putting him on a collision course with the girl's pimp. John works with Billy Parham, who is a bit older and often looks out for the younger man. They share stories with the other ranch hands, though they know their way of life is fading away, and that the US Army has plans to purchase the land where they work and close down the ranch operation. Th...

McCarthy booklist

No Country for Old Men
Hunting antelope in southern Texas, Llewelyn Moss comes across the scene of a drug deal gone bad. Several men are dead and Moss finds a stash of heroin along with over two million dollars in cash. Even though he knows that whoever lost the money will stop at nothing to reclaim it, Llewelyn takes the cash and goes home to his wife, Carla Jean, and tells her to pack her stuff, they are now on the run. Texas Sheriff Bell and a dangerous assasin...
Outer Dark
This is a book about a brother and sister who were... in an incestuous relationship. It starts out with the sister giving birth in a cabin in the southern backwoods. After she gives birth she falls to sleep and the brother decides the baby has to go. He takes the child and walks into the woods and leaves it in a random place. All is well and he returns to his sister and tells her the kid dies. Meanwhile, a traveling salesman finds the kid and takes it. T...
Suttree
Cornelius Suttree gives up his blue-blood heritage to live among the "river people" in Knoxville, TN. Through variously bizarre and touching encounters, he seeks to find the essence of a person's dignity and self-worth independent of the privilege his family offers....
The Crossing
Billy Parham, after freeing a she-wolf from his father's trap, returns home to find his parents murdered and must set out with his brother to recover their stolen horses. Billy Parham is a ruminative young man living with his parents and younger brother in southern Arizona. Ranchers, he and his father regularly set out to check the cattle, sometimes accompanied by his brother, Boyd. They soon find the tracks of a she-wolf, who is hunting their cattle. Wh...
The Road
Cormac McCarthy leaves a lot of food for thought in The Road. It takes place during a time when the world, for all intents and purposes, has come close to an end in what appears to have been a nuclear war. The protagonist, a father whose name we do not know, and his ill son, are left to fend for themselves. Initially, it seems as though no one survived the horror, but over time the two come up against others who are just as desperate for survival. Simil...