By Chris Benedict

Although the eminently reclusive author did not participate in the staged reading of excerpts from The Passenger, what will be his first novel in ten years, Cormac McCarthy did appear onstage at the conclusion of the event to thank the audience assembled at Santa Fe, New Mexico’s Lannan Foundation. Actress Caitlin McShea and evolutionary biologist David Krakauer performed passages of the book rumored to be thirty years in the making. The Passenger will reportedly be published at a still unspecified time in 2016, which will also mark the 50th anniversary of McCarthy’s literary debut The Orchard Keeper, and evidently involve a heavily scientific plotline.

McCarthy’s previous book was The Road, the survival story of a father and son set adrift in a post-apocalyptic wasteland which made for a highly unlikely choice to win 2007’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Yet win it did. The Road was also adapted into a critically-acclaimed film by Australian director John Hillcoat and starred Viggo Mortensen (Lord of the Rings), Charlize Theron (Mad Max: Fury Road), and Kodi Smit-McPhee, with a heart-wrenching cameo appearance by Robert Duvall and a great bit part for Boardwalk Empire’s Michael Kenneth Williams. All The Pretty Horses (the first book in McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy”), James Franco’s attempt at Child of God, and the Coen Brothers’ Academy Award-winning No Country For Old Men have also made the transition from page to screen. McCarthy himself wrote an original screenplay for the wildly disappointing 2013 film The Counselor which featured an all-star cast of Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Penelope Cruz, and No Country’s Anton Chigurh himself (the badass with a bowl-cut, Friend-o) Javier Bardem.

Famous (or infamous depending on one’s tastes) for his unsparingly bleak narratives, unorthodox use of syntax, and a nomenclature often unique to his characters, Cormac McCarthy’s most cherished work among hardcore readers remains 1985’s Blood Meridian (or the Evening Redness in the West). Often considered unfilmable, speculation has run rampant throughout the years over various hands reaching into the Blood Meridian cookie jar, notably Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner) and James Franco, who released a 25-minute test version consisting of raw footage shot while working on Child of God.

Whether The Passenger ever materializes into a movie is immaterial at this juncture. What matters now is that the literary world will soon be that much richer for the arrival of a new novel by (arguably-but I’ll fight any man who disagrees) this generation’s greatest writer.

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