Cormac

I want to say it was Loomis that introduced me to Cormac McCarthy… first the Border Trilogy then Sutree then Blood Meridian then all the rest. I actually had the temerity to review The Road half a lifetime ago; the review is much more of an indication of where I was intellectually than a useful evaluation of the book. I’d also say that No Country for Old Men grew on me a bit after the movie, but I still feel comfortable with the notion that it’s better as a screenplay than as a novel.

I would like to read the last two; I would like to listen to the entire corpus on audiobook because it’s a fundamentally different way of ingesting material (and incidentally Blood Meridian is available for free if you’re an Audible Plus subscriber); I’d like to watch The Counselor, which some have begun to rehabilitate.

Finally, it once occurred to me to think of Blood Meridian and Lonesome Dove as a pair; they were both published in 1985 and they each described a great journey in the Old West. I came to think of Blood Meridian as the West through the lens of Lovecraft, and Lonesome Dove as the West through Tolkien. I think the former judgment is sounder than the latter, but that there’s something to say for both.