Review from a Transgressive Fiction Fan
I started reading this book yesterday morning on my commute to work and finished it about five minutes before i went to bed last night.
But this is much more than just a fast read. Like his book The Road, Cormac has an insane ability to create a world that is so real and so urgent that you are forced to stay in it until you reach a conclusion and find some sort of peace in that world. Even during the hours yesterday not spent reading the book (work, gym, eating) i was IN the book anyway – trapped, but happy. And how does he pull this off with while writing one sparse four-words-in-dialect sentence fragment after another? I wish I knew.
This is also another good example that “literature” doesn’t have to be boring or dense – the plot doesn’t slow down from the handcuff stragulation on page one and I’d put the murders per page at approximately 0.2.
“Insightful” Review from a Mainstream Reader
This is an unbearable sludge of affected tough-guy performance. This is a fantasy of grunts. My guess is that McCarthy’s research consisted in a drive in Texas with some Border Patrol dude. BP dude talked up all the Bad Ombres, gave a stark black-and-white morality tale of the border. McCarthy made it a novel.