SOURCE: "The Land of the Wounded Men," in Tribune Books, June 26, 1994, p. 5.

In the following favorable review, Allen praises the descriptive prose in The Crossing, and the "vividly rendered conflict" of The Stonemason. Comparing McCarthy to Melville and Faulkner, the critic lauds these two works, while acknowledging their frequent melodramatic passages.

Cormac McCarthy, who was born in 1933 and has been publishing novels since 1965, was until only two years ago an obscure name to the larger reading public, burdened with a reputation as a writer's writer. McCarthy's dark and violent fictions, set in the American South and Southwest and redolent of earlier times and more primitive ways, were almost equally praised for their lyrical force and damned for their relentless pessimism.

Then came All the Pretty Horses, a resonant tale of initiation set in southwestern Texas and Mexico, which won both the National Book Award and National Book Critics...