Darkly humorous at times, but a bleak, unflinching look into the deepest depths of the human soul. Each page is dripping with brutality and McCarthy’s prose is like the moonlight poking through the treetops to reveal an image. 

I would call McCarthy’s prose poetic or beautiful, but I feel that would be doing a disservice to his skill as a writer. He manages to weave these quick burst sentences with longer (and and and), meticulously constructed prose that feels completely unique. I think the thing that sets McCarthy’s prose apart from other heavily visual authors (besides his sparse use of punctuation) is how he utilizes the more flowery language. He writes some of the most beautiful sentences you’ve ever read, but it always adds another layer to the scene. There is never a moment where the level of detail he provides hurts the formation of an image in your mind. Some authors add more detail to their prose specifically because they want their prose to feel vivid rather than be vivid, and you end up scratching your head trying to figure out what they’re saying. McCarthy adds detail because it’s necessary. 

It’s an oddly structured book because the first part has a little bit of a continuous narrative with Lester finding a cabin and building his life. However, most of the pages are spent with other characters or spent listening to another character’s view of the world or Lester’s past. It’s all a somewhat loose set of anecdotes that serve mostly as depth building for Lester or the world around him. The second part, on the other hand, is pretty much only focused on Lester’s isolation and violent behavior. This part of the book is much more of a normal narrative structure without much coverage of other characters.

Lester, as a main character, is a bit empty and perhaps underdeveloped. There’s some development of his past life added, but he’s mostly a rather emotionless, frightening man. However, as a subject to study, Lester is fascinating. His slow build from false accusation to necrophilia to murder is expertly crafted and shocking at every turn. Even in a book that doesn’t avoid any of the more vivid, gruesome details, it’s still a shock whenever Lester decides to take his violent actions a little further. 

Overall, even if you fail to connect with Lester’s story or the world around him, McCarthy’s prose is so vivid, so compelling, and so unique that I think anybody with a love of language would come away feeling like they just smoked a cigarette after a night of sex. A master of prose.