This was my first Cormac McCarthy book. I asked a good friend of mine who is a McCarthy fan to pick one and this was his pick.
Man. What an amazing read. All of the components were there: great story, unfamiliar-sounding yet authentic dialog, characters who you really, really cared about. And then on top of that there is a meta-plot about how the hell one ought to behave when the world around you is falling apart, something that seems especially timely.
The story here seems mostly about choosing to commit and persevere no matter how bad the outcome looks. Doing the right thing in the face of inevitability. But it’s so much more than that. The Sheriff may be one of my favorite characters ever. McCarthy’s dialog partly accounts for that but it is also really compelling to watch his internal struggle reconciling his behaviors, something we all deal with at one level or another. Such a great book. Really grateful to have read it.
