Xavier Ray’s Reviews > All the Pretty Horses > Status Update

I stopped when I hit this passage and just sat with it.
“As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.”
McCarthy writes a storm not as weather but as something cosmic, as if creation itself is still being hammered out above us. Moments like this are why I read him slowly — the world gets very still, and I feel something ancient and familiar open up.

There’s a homesick ache in this book for a world I never quite lived in, but somehow recognize in my bones. McCarthy writes the West not as myth, but as memory — of silence, land, and a way of being that feels both gone and still living inside me. Reading this slowly, for the soul, felt like riding out into a familiar country I’ve only ever known in dreams.