From the very beginning of his 60-year career as a writer, dealing with themes of endings, extinctions, and finality has been pivotal for Cormac McCarthy. His first novel, “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), ends with the word “dust,” while his final book, “Stella Maris” (2022), concludes with a character who remarks they’re merely “waiting for the end of something.” Throughout his body of work, not just in “The Road” (2006)—a tale marked by environmental catastrophe following a series of catastrophic events—readers discover McCarthy’s apocalyptic vision. His novels, from the initial southern gothic quartet through mid-career westerns and concluding with “The Passenger” (2022) and “Stella Maris,” reflect a profound inclination toward destruction and desolation. “All the Pretty Horses” (1992), for example, offers ample enjoyment typical of the western genre, including terse dialogue and male camaraderie, yet depicts the US-Mexico borderlands as a “cauterized terrain” or “tenantless waste,” haunted by “the dead standing about in their bones.” “Blood Meridian” (1985) captures a bleak vision, speaking of “the awful darkness inside the world,” while “The Road” offers “darkness implacable,” a term reminiscent of Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
Such textual echoes aren’t surprising, given McCarthy’s literary sensitivity and extensive engagement with authors like Melville and Faulkner, alongside the landscapes inspiring his work. In McCarthy’s world, as in Milton’s, paradise is irrevocably lost. Why do we find ourselves drawn to McCarthy’s harrowing maps of devastation? In part, the answer lies in the final moment of “Stella Maris”: the main character, who is mentally troubled, asks her therapist to hold her hand “because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something.” McCarthy’s stories do not offer comfort in the face of destruction but provide a thrilling sense of counter-forces to counterbalance mortality, akin to the experiences one might find in Samuel Beckett but with more horses. McCarthy’s unique prose, while not universally appealing—Will Self remarked in 2011 that McCarthy was “easily parodied”—captivates enthusiasts with its creativity and vitality. For example, in “All the Pretty Horses,” McCarthy delivers acoustic pleasure with phrases like “salt crust stove” and “trodden isinglass,” enhancing the novel’s topographical precision.
McCarthy’s words vividly paint landscapes, echoing Robert Macfarlane’s view that “words are grained into our landscapes,” and reflecting McCarthy’s commitment to portraying his chosen territories with intensity. Even terrains that initially appear barren, such as New Mexico’s high country in “The Crossing” (1994) or Nebraska in “The Passenger,” are richly detailed, like the Platte river “threading the sandbars in the deep burgundy dusk.” While the politics in McCarthy’s work—its Anglocentric view of Mexico or its focus on white American males—deserve scrutiny, his exploration of landscape and species diversity is a valuable asset in today’s climate crisis. A character near the end of “The Crossing” remarks, “It sounds like death is the truth,” and, indeed, death, in various forms, emerges as a profound subject within McCarthy’s fiction.