The tense encounter in a forbidding landscape, the dark humor in the face of facts, We just assume you wouldn't survive."įinished off with one of his twinkly-eyed laughs, this mealtime anecdote has a more jocular tone than McCarthy's venomous fiction, but the same elements are there. "We don't know how dangerous they are," he said. Kind of man, put the matter in perspective. Two park rangers he met later that day seemed reluctant to discuss lethal vipers among the backpackers. Keeping a respectful distance from the rattlesnake, poking it with a stick, he coaxed it into the grass and drove off. And that's an odd feeling,īecause there's no fence, and you know that after he gets tired of chasing marmots he's going to move in some other direction, which could be yours." "The only thing I had seen that answered that description was a grizzly bear in Alaska. "It's very interesting to see an animal out in the wild that can kill you graveyard dead," he says with a smile. Terrain again dominates the background in "All the Pretty Horses," which will appear next month from Knopf. The vast blankness of the Southwest desert served as a metaphor for the nihilistic violence in his last novel, "Blood Meridian," published in 1985. Rio Grande into Chihuahua, Sonora and Coahuila. McCarthy doesn't write about places he hasn't visited, and he has made dozens of similar scouting forays to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and across the He had come upon the creature while travelingĪlong an empty road in his 1978 Ford pickup near Big Bend National Park. "Mojave rattlesnakes have a neurotoxic poison, almost like a cobra's," he explains, giving a natural-history lesson on the animal's two color phases and its map of distribution in the West. And he is the sort of silver-tongued raconteur who relishes peculiar sidetracks he leans over his plate and fairly croons the particulars Seldom applying the anesthetic of psychology, McCarthy would much rather orate than confide. A writer who renders the brutal actions of men in excruciating detail, Wants to steer conversation away from himself, and he seems to think that a story about a recent trip he took near the Texas-Mexico border will offer some camouflage. The question has come up over lunch in Mesilla, N.M., because the hermitic author, who may be the best unknown novelist in America, " You know about Mojave rattlesnakes?" Cormac McCarthy asks.
The New York Times: Book Review Search ArticleĪpril 19, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final