Cormac McCarthy's writing style might be flippantly described as flirting with run-on sentences and not using much punctuation and making the reader research 19th-century horse tools and esoteric desert geology and creating cool new compoundwords. He is also among the finest living (or dead) novelists of any country. For those lacking the patience or guts for Blood Meridian (ditto the latter for The Road), McCarthy's Border Trilogy is a more romantic vision of western adventure, following the same intertwining families between All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998).
For those seeking something more like Blood Meridian with the accessibility of the Border Trilogy, No Country for Old Men (2005) is an interesting exception among McCarthy's works. He first wrote it as a screenplay, then adapted it to a novel, before Joel and Ethan Coen adapted the novel back into a screenplay for their Academy Award-sweeping 2007 film. When a poor welder from Texas finds $2.4 million at a drug deal gone bad, he figures someone will come looking for it, but can't hardly imagine the deliberate, unknowable psychopath Anton Chigurh stalking the interstate. No Country for Old Men is available from Vintage ($16, 978-0375706677). --Tobias Mutter
