Recommendations
Books Like No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
For readers of McCarthy's most accessible crime novel
If you loved No Country for Old Men's cat-and-mouse plot, Anton Chigurh's terrifying consistency, and Sheriff Bell's meditation on a world he can no longer protect, these books explore McCarthy's wider work or the American crime fiction tradition.
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Buy on AmazonBlood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's greatest and most extreme novel — the essential companion; Chigurh is the Judge in contemporary dress, and Blood Meridian is the mythological development of the same philosophical meditation on violence as a cosmological force.
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Buy on AmazonAll the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's most romantic novel — the accessible companion; both novels are set in the Texas/Mexico border area, but where No Country is forensic and nihilistic, All the Pretty Horses is elegiac and romantic, showing McCarthy's full range.
- 3Buy on Amazon
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's Pulitzer-winning post-apocalyptic novel — the companion in his meditation on what to carry forward when the world is ending; where No Country is about what is lost, The Road is about what might survive.
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Buy on AmazonIn Cold Blood
by Truman Capote
Capote's true crime classic — the predecessor in American literature about cold-blooded murderers; Perry Smith and Dick Hickock are the historical predecessors to Chigurh, and Capote's examination of what made them what they are is the journalistic version of McCarthy's fictional examination.
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Buy on AmazonSuttree
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's most personal and lyrical novel — the companion in his broader work; readers who want to understand the full range of the writer who created Chigurh and Bell should read Suttree to see how warm and comic McCarthy can be.
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Buy on AmazonThe Friends of Eddie Coyle
by George V. Higgins
Higgins's crime classic — the most important companion in American crime fiction that takes criminals seriously without glamorizing them; the Boston criminal world is the Eastern urban version of the West Texas drug world.
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Buy on AmazonOuter Dark
by Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy's second novel — the earliest version of the judgment figure; the three men pursuing Culla in Outer Dark are the early, compressed ancestors of Chigurh's implacable pursuit of Moss.
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Buy on AmazonLonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's Pulitzer-winning Western — the companion in the American Western literary tradition; Call and McCrae's cattle drive is the epic version of what Bell's West Texas represents — a way of life passing — told in a more popular and accessible register.
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