Hmmm. While this was a little cops and robbers for me at times, I was definitely hooked as I kept listening (this was yet another audiobook). I found it to be very different from "The Road" in style, tone, characters, and pretty much everything else one might expect to be fairly typical to an author's writing. I was a little put off by this at first and found myself thinking, "Am I really going to listen to 7 CDs of shoot 'em up and really broad Western accents?" Apparently the answer was yes, because I found myself caring about the characters despite my initial reaction. I can't say that I cared about the story per se, but I cared how it effected the people in it, and that may be the same thing for practical considerations.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I really liked the way McCarthy wrote women, or maybe the way he wrote men around women. Having only read "The Road", which contained zero female characters, I hadn't had a taste of this before. The women in the story are what kept me invested in the story. I really liked the Sheriff when he was around or thinking about Loretta; I even liked poor old redneck Carla Jean, even though Moss was at his most entertaining around the little hitch-hiker. The author comes across like a man with a deep respect and honest affection for the female side of the species, which I think is really uncommon, especially in violent stories.

I think it's worth a read, and probably the closest thing to a western I'm likely to pick up for a while (which probably breaks my dear father's heart). If you have a high tolerance for intentionally bad grammar, give it a try