McCarthy No Country for Old Men

About No Country for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (2005) is his most plot-driven novel — a thriller set in the 1980 Texas-Mexico borderlands in which a welder finds drug cartel money at a massacre scene and sets in motion a pursuit by Anton Chigurh, a killer who has made a philosophical system of his nihilism, and by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, an aging lawman watching the violence with helpless grief. The Coen Brothers' 2007 film adaptation, unusually faithful to the novel, made Chigurh one of popular culture's great demonic figures. No Country for Old Men is the most accessible of McCarthy's late novels, with the same stripped prose — no quotation marks, no adverbs — and the same moral bleakness as the more demanding Blood Meridian. It belongs to his Southwestern novels alongside All the Pretty Horses (1992) and The Road (2006).