No Country for Old Men

Moss finds a drug deal gone wrong out in the desert, takes the case of money, and the rest of it is a chase. What makes it stick isn’t the chase though, it’s Chigurh, who isn’t really a villain so much as a weather system with firm opinions about coin tosses, and Sheriff Bell, who spends his chapters talking quietly about a country that has stopped making sense to him. McCarthy writes the whole thing without quotation marks and with barely any punctuation at all, which sounds like an affectation and reads like a documentary. Then there’s how Moss dies. A main character who didn’t matter enough to have his death marked by more than a passing comment.

But he did matter because his cowboy-stoicism has stayed in my mind ever since I read it.