Cormac McCarthy Novels Ranked
If Toni Morrison is described as “America’s Conscience”, Cormac McCarthy represents something closer to America’s unbridled id. His novels are vicious, unblinking reminders of the deep evils of genocide and violence America was born from, without the sheen of manifest destiny and cultural myths to mask them. Through classic Western tropes—chief among them the cowboy—McCarthy reveals the insidious nature of our inherited folklore, the full price of our collective gains rendered in blood.
(Edited in January 2023 to include his two latest works, The Passenger and Stella Maris.)
12. The Orchard Keeper (1965)
McCarthy’s first two books are characteristically bleak, but standout more for what they lack in comparison to the rest of his works than what they provide. Nowhere is this more frustrating than The Orchard Keeper, which makes readers work so hard to understand so very little. Ostensibly, it’s about a boy and an old man and a middle-aged bootlegger who are connected in some weird ways having to do with murder. (I picked up that much from an online summary.) But the impressionism is dialed up to 11, so much so that it’s difficult to know what’s going on for large swaths of the book. It’s one hazy scene after another, with none of the momentum or suspense that enlivens his best work. Though you can trace a lot of what makes McCarthy special back to the seeds planted here, they’re just germinating.
11. Cities of the Plain (1998)
It’s a better book than The Orchard Keeper in that it’s easier to read, but goddam I hate Cities of the Plain so much. Why, you ask? Because it followed two of McCarthy’s most indelible books and weaves their plots together to complete The Border Trilogy, and it totally sucks. Where All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing gripped and kicked and clawed their way into the psyche, Cities of the Plain goes full telenovela, spinning McCarthy’s most asinine plot (someone falls in love with a hooker who, spoiler alert, gets murdered) out of two stone-cold classics that shouldn’t have been sullied. It’s striking how completely uninspired the language is,* especially coming on the heels of one of the all-time literary hot streaks of the 20th century. Sinking to the depths of self-parody, this is one to avoid at all costs.
10. The Passenger (2022)
Talked about for decades before rearing its head a full 16 years post-Road, The Passenger and its sister novel, Stella Maris, created something of a literary stir when their publication was finally announced. The Passenger was marketed as the more traditional novel, with its scarce plot details sounding like a narrative continuation of the more straightforward thrills of No Country for Old Men. For the first few chapters, it lives up to the hype—there’s a clear cut mystery, gradual introduction of characters, and interstitial passages of Twin Peaks-y hallucinations that immediately cast the book as something new and daring for the author.
How remarkable disappointing, then, that the book seems content to spin its wheels for its second half. That mystery I mentioned earlier? It’s not that it doesn’t go anywhere, it’s that it literally disappears. Without a narrative thrust, the book hangs on McCarthy’s language, which is surprisingly bland. Gone are the flowery run-ons of the Border Trilogy or the exacting terseness of No Country. You’ll never be surprised that you’re reading McCarthy when you’re reading The Passenger, you’ll just be surprised how empty it feels by the time you get to the end.
9. Outer Dark (1968)
The other of McCarthy’s early, inscrutable works, Outer Dark is an improvement in just about every way. The characters are rich, the language is richer, and the smoke has lifted juuuust enough to let readers follow along without needing an investigation board. Still planted firmly in Appalachia, Outer Dark is all incest and dead babies, which makes for a typically cringe-y read.
8. Stella Maris (2022)
Reading Stella Maris a month after The Passenger, it’s impossible not to consider how differently the two works would’ve been received if they were released in the opposite order. Whereas The Passenger reads like diminishing returns of McCarthy’s latter work, Stella Maris is something totally new, wild, and—crucially—exciting. Written entirely as transcripts of therapy appointments, Stella is a slippery, wide-ranging, dense trip of a novel, adding some crucial context and humanity to Alicia Western that never really came across in The Passenger. In many ways, it serves as a commentary on the ideas merely hinted at in its sibling, which makes me think that this was the book McCarthy had been struggling with for so long. On one hand, it makes The Passenger look like an even more unnecessary work, a coat of plot hung on ideas that really could’ve just been explored more directly here. But on the other hand, Stella Maris left me wondering: why didn’t McCarthy work a little bit longer to integrate the two books to make them more cohesive? The fact that you probably can’t read Stella Maris without first diving into The Passenger keeps the book from living up to its full potential, but it’s still a nasty shot of intellectual adrenaline in and of itself.
7. Child of God (1973)
What’s worse than incest and dead babies, you ask? How about a murderous hillbilly necrophiliac? If you don’t yet understand what’s hard to like, then maybe Child of God is the book for you. It’s certainly more straightforward than either The Orchard Keeper or Outer Dark, and it packs a powerful punch in its 150-or-so pages. It’s also where McCarthy starts playing with perspective more intentionally, offering a fairly straightforward character study that you could almost see someone like Stephen King writing. Trust me, though: Stephen King couldn’t come up with the wild, disgusting shit that happens here. Definitely not a book to read alone in the woods,** but it’s the earliest McCarthy book I could recommend to someone in good conscious.
6. The Road (2006)
McCarthy was on something of a roll with The Road came out. No Country for Old Men was an instant hit and spawned the classic Coen Brothers film that took home Best Picture.*** The Road won the Pulitzer, and the famously-reclusive McCarthy even showed up for a TV interview with Queen Oprah herself after landing this book in her Book Club. All that to say, The Road’s popularity likely had less to do with the content (more dead babies, only this time in an apocalypse!) and more to do with the broader cultural recognition of his genius. Not to say that The Road isn’t powerful—like the best of McCarthy’s novels, it grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go until the very end. It’s just not a particularly memorable novel. Post-apocalyptic nightmares were all the rage back in 2006, and other than his characteristically clear language, not much separates this from other works in the genre.
5. No Country for Old Men (2005)
No Country rides the line between essential and simply fantastic, but the velocity at which this thing moves helps push toward the former. Gone are the linguistic flourishes and long romantic passages that marked The Border Trilogy. Instead, this thing is all grit, told in sharp outlines with the speed of a bullet and the force of a jackhammer. McCarthy has never been a fan of punctuation, but No Country for Old Men takes his razor-sharp approach and exacts every superfluous word from the book, leaving you with a straight shot of adrenaline that doesn’t let up until the last, famously impressionistic chapter. It’s the McCarthy book for non-McCarthy fans, a cat-and-mouse hunt where the cat (Anton Chigur) is truly the stuff of nightmares, and the best character McCarthy ever created. It’s still got the blood and body count of any other McCarthy novel, but it’s by far his most accessible work, and a great introduction to the author for newcomers.
4. Suttree (1979)
These final four books on this list are all stone-cold classics, but Suttree is the most idiosyncratic of the bunch. Amongst McCarthy’s works, it sticks out like a sore thumb, a long, meandering, hilarious and heartbreaking novel that resembles Huckleberry Finn more than Blood Meridian. It’s also best seen as the culmination of everything McCarthy had been working toward up to this point—it’s his last book set firmly in the South, and it’s his last overtly impressionistic work. But it’s also a kaleidoscopic explosion of his work up to that point. There’s a lightness and richness to Suttree that stands in stark contrast with the pitch-black animalism of his first three novels, and it’s also longer than all three of those books combined. Suttree tends to get overlooked in the mainstream when McCarthy’s name is brought up, which is a real shame, because its legacy should be that of America’s Ulysses.
3. All the Pretty Horses (1992)
And thus began The Border Trilogy. After taking a hard pivot with Blood Meridian to the Southwest borderlands between the US and Mexico, McCarthy decided to forego Appalachia and tunnel deeper into the frontier subculture. While the setting didn’t change, the approach shifted considerably. Sure, there’s an absurd amount of violence and gratuitous descriptions of what happens when someone gets their throat slit in a prison fight. But there’s also a softness to All the Pretty Horses that McCarthy hadn’t explored outside of Suttree. People always talk about Horses as a romance, and sure, there’s a boy who falls in love with a girl, but the real romance in this book is in the language—the descriptions of the landscape, the flowers, and (duh) the horses. A perfect book in almost every sense, All the Pretty Horses is McCarthy at his best.
2. Blood Meridian (1985)
If books were judged by body count, Blood Meridian would be the greatest book of all time. I’m sure someone’s counted how many murders are described in gory detail here, but my shoot-from-the-hip guess would be at least 200. There are scalpings, impalings, throat-sittings, hangings, clubbings, and (yawn) plain ol’ bullets through the back of the brain. These things happen to women, children, babies, seniors, and just about everyone you could possibly imagine. And, most horrifyingly, it’s based on a true story.***** But…damn, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. There’s a mania to Blood Meridian that’s totally unmatched in literature. That it serves as a gruesome reminder of humanity’s ugliest impulses elevates it to art of the highest order, a fearsome reckoning of our race’s capacity for evil with every speck of blood accounted for.
1. The Crossing (1994)
Cormac McCarthy has written four perfect books, and The Crossing is the most perfect. Every impulse and idea he explored throughout his career is represented here in some fashion—the violence of the West, the romantic draw of conquest, the trampling of innocence—and it’s rendered with a staggering tenderness and compassion that can knock you flat on your ass when you least expect it. Told in three parts, with each section telling the story of a different time protagonist Billy Parham crosses into Mexico,****** the novel traces widening circles around its themes at a Biblical scale, drawing out new, painful realities from each trip until there’s nothing left to do but cry in the middle of the street. In particular, the first third of the book that traces Billy’s quest with a leashed wolf might be the best 150 pages written in the last hundred years. Why people hold up Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses above this is a complete mystery to me, as The Crossing is a masterpiece from start to finish.
Footnotes
*The most memorable scene by far in Cities is when the cowboys head into the hills to kill a pack of dogs that keep murdering the livestock. It’s about as gruesome as anything else McCarthy has written, but it’s not nearly enough to save the rest of this godawful book from the garbage heap.
**I’m an idiot and actually did read Child of God alone in the woods.
***No Country for Old Men the movie is better than No Country for Old Men the book. The Coens practically used McCarthy’s spartan text as the script for the film, but were able to blow it out and reel in some all-time great performances (Javier Bardem, in particular) that come across even more powerful on screen than they were on the page.
*****Blood Meridian is based upon the story of the Glanton Gang, a group of American mercenaries who hunted Native and Mexican scalps in the 1849-50 before they were massacred by Quechans in Yuma, Arizona.
******Bish, you should’ve learned that nothing good happens in Cormac McCarthy’s Mexico after the first trip!
