Me, after reading a Cormac McCarthy book: I think I’ve read all the Cormac McCarthy I care to.
Me, a year later in the Library: ooh, a Cormac McCarthy book!
I’m reading Blood Meridian, which is the one where a boy heads from Texas to Mexico where he has a series of deadly yet picaresque adventures and becomes a man while riding a horse all the time. Oh, wait, that’s all of them except The Road, which is the one set in a bleak post apocalyptic hellscape which plumbs the depths of depravity and despair and somehow got made into a movie. I’d have like to have heard the elevator pitch for that one – It’s McCarthy’s bleakest book but hey Old Country for Old Men made a lot of money so let’s make this one into a movie, at least it’s short and has few characters. It’s one thing to read a bleak book because when you want to sip, you can sip, and when you want to gulp, you can gulp, but a movie version, that’s almost two hours of bottoms up, chug a lug from the growler of depravity and despair until every last drop is gone. Let’s just say Cormac McCarthy thought John Calvin a cockeyed optimist – I’ll see your total depravity and raise you way more depravity than total and no God to redeem anyone.
But man, does his writing have a unique style that just pulls you in.
