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If you haven’t heard yet, Cormac McCarthy passed away on Tuesday.

We loved Cormac because he was a rebel. By ignoring any and all standard literary conventions (and not giving two shits about critical opinion) he firmly established his legacy as one of the all-time iconoclasts of the English language, a literary leviathan with an objective voice that boomed, never whispered.

He wrote about the borderlands. He wrote about the gothic south. His stories often wandered, but with purpose. He loved a good neo-western, and he loved his horses (90% of my recollection of All The Pretty Horses are entire chapters spent describing the saddling and de-saddling processes in excruciating detail). But, perhaps most notably, he went back to the frontier with his magnum opus Blood Meridian, which forced the reader’s eyes open to a grisly side of American history that most still refuse to acknowledge. The text reads like Shakespeare decided to write an X-rated western:

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

Take a breath now! He had no trouble operating on the other end of the aesthetic spectrum, too. Here’s an example of his more conservative side, a passage from No Country For Old Men, which reads more like a screenplay than a novel:

“The waitress brought the coffee in two heavy white china mugs. Bell stirred his with his spoon. He raised the spoon and looked into the smoking silver bowl of it. How much money did he give you?

She didn’t answer. Bell smiled. What did you start to say? He said. You can say it.

I started to say that’s some more of your business, ain’t it.

Why don’t you just pretend I ain’t the sheriff.

And pretend you’re what?

You know he’s in trouble.

Llewelyn aint done nothing.

It’s not me he’s in trouble with.

Who’s he in trouble with then.

Some pretty bad people.

Llewellyn can take care of hisself.

Do you care if I call you Carla?

I go by Carla Jean.

Carla Jean. Is that alright? That’s alright. You don’t mind if I keep callin you Sheriff do you?

Bell smiled. No he said, that’s fine.

All right.

These people will kill him, Carla Jean. They won’t quit.

He won’t either. He never has.

Bell nodded. He sipped his coffee. The face that lapped and shifted in the dark liquid in the cup seemed an omen of things to come. Things losing shape. Taking you with them.”

He once famously said, “If it doesn’t concern life and death, it’s not interesting.” But we’ll make an exception for Suttree, which - if such a crossover exists - meets somewhere at the intersection of William Faulkner and Eastbound and Down.

“Two pairs of Brogans went along the rows.

You ain’t goin to believe this.

Knowing you for a born liar I most probably wont.

Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.

What?

I said somebody has been…

No. No. Hell no. Damn you if you ain’t got a warped mind.

I’m tellin you…

I dont want to hear it.

Looky here.

And here.

They wont along the outer row of the melonpatch. He stopped to nudge a melon with his toe. Yellowjackets snarled in the seepage. Some were ruined a good time past and lay soft with rot, wrinkled with imminent collapse.

It looks like it, dont it?

I’m tellin ye I seen him. I didnt know what the hell was goin on when he dropped his drawers. Then when I seen what he was up to I still didn’t believe it. But yonder they lay.

What do you aim to do?

Hell, I don’t know.

It’s about too late to do anything. He’s damn near screwed the whole patch. I dont see why he couldnt of stuck to just one. Or a few.”

We’ll leave you with a bit of prose from The Passenger, published October of last year. The book is the first half of a two-part diatribe on metaphysics, madness, and generational guilt that - considering the overarching themes of Cormac’s now-complete body of work - is as fitting a swan song as any. —Jackson Todd

"He sat wrapped in one of the gray rescue blankets from the emergency bag and drank hot tea. The dark sea lapped about. The Coast Guard boat that had pulled up a hundred yards off sat rocking in the swells with the running lights on and beyond that ten miles to the north you could see the lights of trucks moving along the causeway, coming out of New Orleans and heading east along US 90 toward Pass Christian, Biloxi, Mobile. Mozart’s second violin concerto was playing on the tapedeck. The air temperature was forty-four degrees and it was three seventeen in the morning.

The tender was lying on his elbows with the headset on watching the dark water beneath them. From time to time the sea would ﬂare with a soft sulphurous light where forty feet down Oiler was working with the cuttingtorch. Western watched the tender and he blew on the tea and sipped it and he watched the lights moving along the causeway like the slow cellular crawl of waterdrops on a wire. Strobing faintly where they passed behind the concrete balusters. There was an onshore wind coming up past the western tip of Cat Island and there was a light chop to the water. Smell of oil and the rich tidal funk of mangrove and saltgrass from the islands."