Cormac McCarthy, author of The Orchard Keeper, is one of these. Some novelists can write with brilliance and a fresh point of view about such familiar matters…Others, although they are highly gifted too, are sorely handicapped by their humble and excessive admiration for William Faulkner. Traditional folkways and folk speech, the sounds and smells of the natural world, and the violent behavior of men not yet truly civilized are irresistibly appealing as material for fiction. “Woods and fields, mountains and cabins, isolation and cranky independence, these seem good to the literary mind and especially good if the writer in childhood had a fleeting glimpse of some last outpost of rural America. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. To mark what would have been McCarthy’s 90th birthday, here’s a look back at what the critics wrote about each of his twelve novels. For over half a century the famously aloof novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, who died last month at the age of 89, plunged into the dark, arid subconscious of the American west and surfaced with a series of bleak and terrifying visions. If you answered “yes” to any of these, you probably are, or should be, a Cormac McCarthy fan. The crushing black vacuum of the universe The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world.

They were watching, out there past men’s knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory.

Death is what the living carry with them.

Wild at heart and captivating book