Endings, extinctions, last things preoccupied Cormac McCarthy from the start to the recent close of his 60-year career as a writer of fiction and, occasionally, drama for stage or screen. His first novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), ends with the word “dust”. His final novel, Stella Maris (2022), allows only the briefest interval before an equivalent termination, finishing with the central character saying she is “waiting for the end of something”.
It is not only in The Road (2006), where environmental devastation has followed “a shear of light and a series of long concussions”, that McCarthy’s reader finds apocalypse. All of his novels, from the early quartet in southern gothic style, through the mid-career westerns, to the last diptych of The Passenger (2022) and Stella Maris, show a drive towards the ruined and the depleted.
All the Pretty Horses (1992), for example, offers in generous measure the satisfactions of the western: laconic dialogue and male camaraderie, say, or feats of equestrian skill. Yet the novel imagines the US-Mexico borderlands as “cauterized terrain” or “tenantless waste”, inhabited by “the dead standing about in their bones”.
