McCarthy is often linked with the "Southern Gothic" tradition, although that term is itself an ambiguous one.

Certainly he shares with many Southern writers a predisposition to grotesques and acts of violence. He also displays a kind of wild folk humor, a love of dialect, and a richness of vocabulary. The two writers McCarthy most clearly brings to mind are William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. Like Faulkner, he experiments in language and narrative form, and creates a very personal world with each novel. He studies the outsider and admires those who endure and who probe beneath the surface. He shares with O'Connor a Catholic fascination with evil and redemption and the awesome power of grace. There is always a strong sense of the religious in his work, as well as an awareness of moral irony. A character like Culla Holme or Lester Ballard (in his third...