“A Texas welder finds a satchel of cash at a drug-deal massacre, and the man who comes for it does not stop.”
What's in this book
- Cormac McCarthy's 2005 contemporary Western - a hunter finds a drug deal gone wrong in 1980 Texas
- The basis for the 2007 Coen Brothers Best Picture Oscar-winning film adaptation
- 320 pages of clean McCarthy prose alternating Sheriff Bell's first-person reflection with third-person pursuit chapters
- Anton Chigurh is one of the most-discussed antagonists in contemporary American literary fiction
- Tom Stechschulte audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of Blood Meridian, The Road, and contemporary American literary-noir fiction
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No Country for Old Men is Cormac McCarthy's 2005 thriller, the most accessible novel in his late period and the source for the 2007 Coen Brothers film. Llewelyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran welder hunting antelope in West Texas, finds the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong: dead Mexicans, bullet-riddled trucks, two million dollars in a satchel, a wounded survivor begging for water. Moss takes the money. Anton Chigurh, a contract killer with a cattle gun, is hired to retrieve it. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell of Terrell County is the third corner of the triangle, an aging law enforcement officer trying and failing to keep up with the violence the modern drug trade has brought to his county.
McCarthy's prose discipline reaches its lifetime peak here. The novel is short by his standards (320 pages), and the sentences are stripped of even more punctuation and ornament than The Road would later borrow. The Chigurh sections are some of the most precisely engineered antagonist writing in modern American fiction. The Bell monologues that frame the novel (Bell's first-person reflections opening each chapter) are McCarthy's clearest engagement with the question that defines the late work: how did America get this violent, and what is the moral cost of having stopped being able to be surprised by it.
Recommended as McCarthy's most accessible entry point, as the source for the Coen Brothers' best film, and as required modern American literary thriller reading. Five stars and the right place to start if you have not read McCarthy. The Tom Stechschulte audiobook is the definitive audio production.
Related reads
If you liked No Country for Old Men
Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy 1985 review. A nameless teenager joins a band of Indian-hunters along the Texas-Mexico border in 1849. The most violent American novel of the late twentieth century and the rare McCarthy book that demands the prose attention it requires.
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
The Road by Cormac McCarthy 2006 review. A father and son walk south across a burned-out post-apocalyptic America toward an uncertain coast. Pulitzer Prize 2007 and one of the great American novels of the twenty-first century.
Suttree
by Cormac McCarthy
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy 1979 review. An educated Knoxville man lives as a fisherman among the city's underclass. McCarthy's pre-Blood-Meridian comic-tragic masterwork.
Stella Maris
by Cormac McCarthy
Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy 2022 review. Alicia Western's seven sessions with a Wisconsin psychiatrist in 1972. McCarthy's final novel and the companion to The Passenger.
The Passenger
by Cormac McCarthy
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy 2022 review. A New Orleans salvage diver investigates a submerged private-jet wreckage. The first of McCarthy's two final novels.
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987 review. Sethe, a former slave living in Reconstruction-era Ohio, is haunted by the daughter she killed to save from slavery. Pulitzer Prize 1988 and one of the canonical American novels of the late twentieth century.
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