ALL THE PRETTY HORSES by Cormac McCarthy ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“He said that it was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all.”

—————————————————————————————

This sucked me in hard. Harder than any book I’ve read recently, and it may have shot itself straight into my top five. I read it in three days and three page-ripping sittings. Cormac McCarthy is one of the greats of our time. This isn’t news to anyone.

McCarthy proves you don’t need pristine grammar and writing etiquette to get the point across. His bare bones style is a character of its own, lending his prose a dustier, more naturalistic atmosphere. It propels you forward, drawing you closer to the action and the people—and their dirty work.

There’s a sharp undercurrent of danger in all of his work, at least the three I’ve read. Like you know something’s coming up the pass, and there’s no way around it. Yet, a deep dose of dread still floods you when the time comes and you remember just how easy it is to find bad people in the world. There are horror writers out there, and then there’s Cormac McCarthy.

I’ve noticed that award winning novels like this one often succeed by telling of the world as it is, at least in one specific place, in words that make that place almost mystical. Like they’ve unearthed something that’s been there all along, and if you went back to that spot, you’d watch it all play out in front of you, probably noticing more having read the author’s version than you would with your own eyes.

I love the way he writes history and violence and nature, as if all three are inherent to being alive and maybe you aren’t really living if you haven’t experienced both the beauty and the wrath of each. Good things come at a price in his books, and nothing is sweet for long. He makes you question each person, each event, each sliver of foreshadowing, wondering which will be the one to knock the dominoes over. There’s not many things more haunting and honest than McCarthy’s work, and this might be the best of the bunch.