All the Pretty Horses is the first of what publishers are calling McCarthy's Border Trilogy. The second installment of this trilogy, The Crossing, presents a completely new slate of characters but repeats many of the earlier novel's patterns and themes.

Blood Meridian (1985), the McCarthy novel that immediately preceded this one, is also a Western involving a young male character who travels into Mexico, but that is about where the similarities end. The graphic violence and horrifying evil in Blood Meridian are utterly relentless. The youth, known only as "the kid," joins a gang of scalp hunters led by the obsessive Captain Glanton and the satanic giant, Judge Holden.

A much closer literary relative for John Grady Cole can be found in McCarthy's first published novel, The Orchard Keeper (1965), where even the protagonist's name sounds similar — John Wesley Rattner. Although he is not a cowboy, John...