A posting by Will Hoyt about Cormac McCarthy, in particular his last novel(s) Stella Maris and The Passenger.  He starts with his appreciation for the counter-counter culture book Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone.

I mostly know Stone in reference to his old friend Ken Kesey.  In fact the main character in Dog Soldiers is based on Kesey’s friend Neal Cassady.  Kesey and Stone were famously foils in that Kesey was a leader of the 60s left and Stone was a conservative.  Stone’s distain for the 60s counterculture, or perhaps the corruption of its ideals, permeates Dog Soldiers.  I have a hard time recalling a nastier book with almost no redeeming characters. Still a great read.  If you are looking for the movie version it was called Who’ll Stop The Rain with Nick Nolte and Tuesday Weld.  Equally nasty.  But we are taking about a story of smuggling heroin out of war-torn Vietnam. Not much nice to say about any of it.

But McCarthy.  A good read by Hoyt even if he goes a bit religious, even Catholic, at the end.  But who else does the Apocalypse better than the Catholics do?

Why Cormac McCarthy Stands Alone Among Novelists