No Country for Old Men

⚖The case for it

A bag of drug money, an implacable killer (Anton Chigurh, whose coin-flip nihilism is among literature's great villains), and a sheriff too old for the new violence. Technically a thriller; philosophically a meditation on evil, fate, and the entropy of American civilization. The Coen Brothers' adaptation is a masterpiece; the novel is bleaker and more mysterious.

— the canon

✕The case against

McCarthy drafted this as a screenplay and never fully un-wrote it: the prose strips down to stage directions, and the climactic death happens offstage between sections. Bell's italicized monologues, an old man certain the country has gone to hell, slide toward the reactionary porch-talk McCarthy elsewhere complicates. Chigurh carries the book; the philosophy leans on him hard.

— the honest librarian