Shannon
Hillsborough
A review of this — 31 weeks ago
I don’t think this novel had the same sense of sweeping epic as McCarthy’s masterpiece Blood Meridian, but the parallels between the two novels are clear. Even in the modern era, the West is a place of violent inevitability, a place that breeds shootouts and wars in its rocky soil.
The novel opens with a young man, Llewelyn Moss, stumbling across the grisly remains of a drug-related shootout in the Texas back country, where he finds and takes a satchel full of money. He then makes a crucial mistake — a mistake fueled by compassion or perhaps guilt — and that sets into motion a chain of events. He becomes hunted by an inhuman killer, and they in turn are being tracked by a small-town Texas sheriff, who is becoming more and more aware of his futile role in the war that these dark forces are waging around him. There is no law in Texas, and the drug runners and their customers are just modern-day equivalents of the Indian hunters and renegade soldier-cowboy-outlaws of an earlier time.
