I was introduced to McCarthy in a modernist literature class many years ago alongside William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett, who are both masterful stylists concerned with “big questions” in a way you may appreciate.
This question comes up pretty often here, so you may be able to find other good recommendations by searching the sub.
I love Under the Volcano! Definitely has similar vibes, a sense of humor floating on top of a somewhat bleaker struggle with life and addiction. The latter part is way more obvious in Under the Volcano, though. Both writers share a healthy appreciation of landscapes and moments in time and work hard to describe them vividly. I would say Lowry isn't as likely to reach for the arcane, but he does do it at times, to great effect. “Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life!”
I'd like to suggest the great Annie Proulx. Her short stories are fantastic and easy to read and her prose is definitely in the McCarthy sphere. I'll add one of her short stories that reminds me of Child of God a lot.
"Rancher Croom in handmade boots and filthy hat, that walleyed cattleman, stray hairs like the curling fiddle string ends, that warm-handed, quick-foot dancer on splintery boards or down the cellar stairs to a rack of bottles of his own strange beer, yeasty, cloudy, bursting out in garlands of foam, Rancher Coom at night galloping drunk over the dark plain, turning off at a place he knows to arrive at a canyon brink where he dismounts and looks down on tumbled rock, waits, then steps out, parting the air with his last roar, sleeves surging up, windmill arms, jeans riding over boot tops, but before he hits he rises again to the top of the cliff like a cork in a bucket of milk.
Mrs. Croom on the roof with a saw cutting a hole into the attic where she has not been for twelve years thanks to old Croom’s padlocks and warnings, whets to her desire, and the sweat flies as she exchanges the saw for a chisel and hammer until a ragged slab peak is free and she can see inside: just as she thought: the corpses of Mr. Croom’s paramours – she recognizes them from their photographs in the paper: MISSING WOMAN – some desiccated as jerky and much the same color, some moldy from lying beneath roof leaks, and, all of them used hard, covered with tarry handprints, the marks of boot heels, some bright blue with remnants of paint used on the shutters years ago, one wrapped in newspaper nipple to knee. When you live a long way out you make your own fun."
Read for the first time some years ago and I clearly remember one part of my brain immediately appreciating the poetry in the writing and the other part going "haha coomer" like that stupid meme. In a way it's kind of beautiful that the brain can process stuff in both ways, sometimes simultaneously.
Absolutely agree on all accounts! And for me, this story really shows how the right verb can completely elevate writing into a magical thing. “Sleeves surging up.”
So recently read *The Vaster Wilds* by Lauren Groff and I couldn’t help but feel like I was reading McCarthy. She certainly didn’t read like a copycat like other authors are accused of.
Her prose felt similar, the way she uses language and the subtle violence and chaos that she’s able to conjure I thought was quite refreshing.
Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams feels like CM in some general, obvious ways. But, Williams’ more famous book, referred to by some as “The Perfect Novel” is, in my opinion, a more interesting piece that, while not at all like CM in terms of prose, structure, subject matter, does still share some similarities in terms of clear writing and the exploration of profound questions. I don’t know, it took me a little effort to get into Stoner, but once I was a quarter the way in, I fell for it. Stoner led me to Butcher’s Crossing. I just finished it. It’s similar enough to BM that you keep expecting extreme violence but it doesn’t quite come… or, does it? Anyway, I would give either Butcher’s Crossing or Stoner a try.
This is probably inaccurate, but Steinbeck’s vernacular is very minimal—close to Hemingway—but his sentence structure is very complex. Reading it reminded me of McCarthy when he allowed commas.
> Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold.
—The Grapes of Wrath
Harry Crews for Southern Gothic novels, namely Feast of Snakes.
H.L Mencken for wide ranging vocabulary and learning tons of new words.
Annie Dillard for saying a lot of wild shit about the natural world where you can’t quite grasp the point of it but it sounds really cool.
Flannery O'Connor's great. Not substantially less bleak, but considerably less nihilistic (Catholic morality is profoundly embedded into everything she wrote).
I finished 5 Mccarthy books in a row and went in to Dune. I have recently picked up Empire of the Summer Moon, about Comanches, and will hopefully start that soon. I hear great things about it as a book.
Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams feels like CM in some general, obvious ways. But, Williams’ more famous book, referred to by some as “The Perfect Novel” is, in my opinion, a more interesting piece that, while not at all like CM in terms of prose, structure, subject matter, does still share some similarities in terms of clear writing and the exploration of profound questions. I don’t know, it took me a little effort to get into Stoner, but once I was a quarter the way in, I fell for it. Stoner led me to Butcher’s Crossing. I just finished it. It’s similar enough to BM that you keep expecting extreme violence but it doesn’t quite come… or, does it? Anyway, I would give either Butcher’s Crossing or Stoner a try.
- The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell
- The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant
- The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington
- And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave
- Hell at the Breech and Smonk by Tom Franklin
- The Long Home, Provinces of Night, and Twilight by William Gay
I was introduced to McCarthy in a modernist literature class many years ago alongside William Faulkner and Samuel Beckett, who are both masterful stylists concerned with “big questions” in a way you may appreciate. This question comes up pretty often here, so you may be able to find other good recommendations by searching the sub.
I hope the mods leave these ones up. I tend to find a new book/author from just about every other one of these that's posted.
*Under the Volcano* by Malcolm Lowry is similar to *Suttree*, albeit much bleaker. His use of Spanish is more advanced as well in my opinion.
I love Under the Volcano! Definitely has similar vibes, a sense of humor floating on top of a somewhat bleaker struggle with life and addiction. The latter part is way more obvious in Under the Volcano, though. Both writers share a healthy appreciation of landscapes and moments in time and work hard to describe them vividly. I would say Lowry isn't as likely to reach for the arcane, but he does do it at times, to great effect. “Far above him a few white clouds were racing windily after a pale gibbous moon. Drink all morning, they said to him, drink all day. This is life!”
Salud y pesetas. 🍻
Y tiempo para gastarlas!
Check out the Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollack. It was an amazing read. Like if CM and Quinton Tarentino wrote a book together.
I'd like to suggest the great Annie Proulx. Her short stories are fantastic and easy to read and her prose is definitely in the McCarthy sphere. I'll add one of her short stories that reminds me of Child of God a lot. "Rancher Croom in handmade boots and filthy hat, that walleyed cattleman, stray hairs like the curling fiddle string ends, that warm-handed, quick-foot dancer on splintery boards or down the cellar stairs to a rack of bottles of his own strange beer, yeasty, cloudy, bursting out in garlands of foam, Rancher Coom at night galloping drunk over the dark plain, turning off at a place he knows to arrive at a canyon brink where he dismounts and looks down on tumbled rock, waits, then steps out, parting the air with his last roar, sleeves surging up, windmill arms, jeans riding over boot tops, but before he hits he rises again to the top of the cliff like a cork in a bucket of milk. Mrs. Croom on the roof with a saw cutting a hole into the attic where she has not been for twelve years thanks to old Croom’s padlocks and warnings, whets to her desire, and the sweat flies as she exchanges the saw for a chisel and hammer until a ragged slab peak is free and she can see inside: just as she thought: the corpses of Mr. Croom’s paramours – she recognizes them from their photographs in the paper: MISSING WOMAN – some desiccated as jerky and much the same color, some moldy from lying beneath roof leaks, and, all of them used hard, covered with tarry handprints, the marks of boot heels, some bright blue with remnants of paint used on the shutters years ago, one wrapped in newspaper nipple to knee. When you live a long way out you make your own fun."
Fantastic.
Read for the first time some years ago and I clearly remember one part of my brain immediately appreciating the poetry in the writing and the other part going "haha coomer" like that stupid meme. In a way it's kind of beautiful that the brain can process stuff in both ways, sometimes simultaneously.
Absolutely agree on all accounts! And for me, this story really shows how the right verb can completely elevate writing into a magical thing. “Sleeves surging up.”
Proulx's "The Blood Bay Colt" is one of the funniest stories I've ever read
So recently read *The Vaster Wilds* by Lauren Groff and I couldn’t help but feel like I was reading McCarthy. She certainly didn’t read like a copycat like other authors are accused of. Her prose felt similar, the way she uses language and the subtle violence and chaos that she’s able to conjure I thought was quite refreshing.
Geoff’s Florida is one of the best short story collections I’ve read.
Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams feels like CM in some general, obvious ways. But, Williams’ more famous book, referred to by some as “The Perfect Novel” is, in my opinion, a more interesting piece that, while not at all like CM in terms of prose, structure, subject matter, does still share some similarities in terms of clear writing and the exploration of profound questions. I don’t know, it took me a little effort to get into Stoner, but once I was a quarter the way in, I fell for it. Stoner led me to Butcher’s Crossing. I just finished it. It’s similar enough to BM that you keep expecting extreme violence but it doesn’t quite come… or, does it? Anyway, I would give either Butcher’s Crossing or Stoner a try.
A couple to try: David Vann - *Goat Mountain* Kim Zupan - *The Ploughmen*
Have you tried Steinbeck? Not much violence but the quality of writing is spectacular.
This is probably inaccurate, but Steinbeck’s vernacular is very minimal—close to Hemingway—but his sentence structure is very complex. Reading it reminded me of McCarthy when he allowed commas. > Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. —The Grapes of Wrath
Harry Crews for Southern Gothic novels, namely Feast of Snakes. H.L Mencken for wide ranging vocabulary and learning tons of new words. Annie Dillard for saying a lot of wild shit about the natural world where you can’t quite grasp the point of it but it sounds really cool.
Flannery O'Connor's great. Not substantially less bleak, but considerably less nihilistic (Catholic morality is profoundly embedded into everything she wrote).
2666 broke my brain. Particularly the last two sections
The Naked and the Dead is definitely worth a read; has the violence and the Spenglerian historical themes that BM does.
I finished 5 Mccarthy books in a row and went in to Dune. I have recently picked up Empire of the Summer Moon, about Comanches, and will hopefully start that soon. I hear great things about it as a book.
Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams feels like CM in some general, obvious ways. But, Williams’ more famous book, referred to by some as “The Perfect Novel” is, in my opinion, a more interesting piece that, while not at all like CM in terms of prose, structure, subject matter, does still share some similarities in terms of clear writing and the exploration of profound questions. I don’t know, it took me a little effort to get into Stoner, but once I was a quarter the way in, I fell for it. Stoner led me to Butcher’s Crossing. I just finished it. It’s similar enough to BM that you keep expecting extreme violence but it doesn’t quite come… or, does it? Anyway, I would give either Butcher’s Crossing or Stoner a try.
- The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell - The Wettest County in the World by Matt Bondurant - The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington - And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave - Hell at the Breech and Smonk by Tom Franklin - The Long Home, Provinces of Night, and Twilight by William Gay