After 2006’s apocalyptic tragedy The Road, many figured a then 73 year-old Cormac McCarthy would call it quits. And for a while, he did.

Despite his firmly established legacy as one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language (he’s been called “Faulkner with a thesaurus”) and penning what some consider to be the Great American Novel, Blood Meridian, he checked into New Mexico’s Santa Fe Institute to study math equations.

Typical Cormac move - After a while, it started to seem like he had given up the writer’s life completely.

Luckily, this hiatus proved to be temporary. 2022 saw a now 89 year-old Cormac publishing not one but two new novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, a single story separated into two parts, each more than a decade in the making.

The Passenger tells the story of Bobby Western, a salvage diver based in the Gulf of Mexico “haunted by loss, afraid of the watery deep, pursued for a conspiracy beyond his understanding, and longing for a death he cannot reconcile with God.” Western bounces between The French Quarter and the greater South, forever looking over his shoulder after being identified by a pair of strange, badge-touting men as one of two living witnesses to a the wreckage of a downed airliner whose shady circumstances point to conspiracy, all the while bearing the sins of his father, a physicist who aided in the creation of the Atomic Bomb.

Although The Passenger is actually easier on the brain than most of Cormac’s other work, he’s still up to many of his old deliberately-arrhythmic literary tricks, such as the incessant and interruptive use of the word “and,” total omission of quotation marks and the semicolon, and the seldom-utilized third person/stream of consciousness perspective blend.

Good ol’ Cormac, the last of a dying breed.

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The Passenger is our favorite novel of 2022. While slightly more accessible than most of his catalogue, Cormac’s latest release maintains his effortless brilliance and trademark dream-like tone; it’s on par with Blood Meridian as some of the best work of his career. Read it now before it inevitably gets the Hollywood treatment. —Jackson Todd

Side Note: If you have the time, click here for a fun and wordy essay on language and the unconscious mind by Cormac.