“A Texas welder finds a satchel of cash at a drug-deal massacre, and the man who comes for it does not stop.”
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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.
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