Books like The Orchard Keeper

"They are gone now. Fled, banished in death or exile, lost, undone. Over the land sun and wind still move to burn and sway the trees, the grasses. No avatar, no scion, no vestige of that people remains. On the lips of the strange race that now dwells there their names are myth, legend, dust." -- Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard KeeperMcCarthy is at a natural disadvantage when an obsessive reader finally works back to his first book. Invariably, McCarthy will be unfairly graded against his own amazing later output. I liked Orchard Keeper. I really did. It was superior in almost every way that matters to most serious writing out there, but it just didn't hold up against other McCarthy novels. If one considers \ Suttree\ and \ Blood Meridian\ to be his masterpieces (and thus 5 stars), and \ The Road\ , \ No Country for Old Men\ and \ All the Pretty Horses\ to be solid pieces of American literature (all 4 stars), it is unavoidable that the Orchard Keeper rates only three.The great thing about reading this first McCarthy is you can see the germs of all of McCarthy's potential built into it. It contains the strange embryo of all of McCarthy's future greatness: his great mythic prose, amazing archetypal characters, beautifully grand, natural scenes. If you love McCarthy, please don't skip the Orchard Keeper, just don't expect it to knock you down, and chill you to the bone, and blow you away like Blood Meridian or Suttree.