Houlcroft’s Reviews > The Crossing > Status Update

With each subsequent McCarthy book, The Road, the novel for which I, like so many others, fell in love with McCarthy’s prose, has felt further and further apart from the oeuvre he has crafted, that post-apocalyptic trek so far apart from the grounded, earthy love letters to the American South, yet finally I see it here, in Billy Parham and his trek southwards across a desolate land with a companion in his care.

When those eyes and the nation to which they stood witness were gone at last with their dignity back into their origins there would perhaps be other fires and other witnesses and other worlds otherwise beheld. But they would not be this one.

A world construed out of blood and blood's alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blood had power to resonate against that void which threatened hourly to devour it. He wrapped himself in the blanket and watched her.

He woke all night with the cold. He'd rise and mend back the fire and she was always watching him. When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void.

There’s such a tenderness so far. I’m loving it. Perhaps even more than All The Pretty Horses.
The section from the wolf’s perspective threw me for a moment but I see its purpose now.