Cormac McCarthy has never been better...The booming, omnipotent narrative voice, which first appeared in McCarthy's Western novels of the 1980s...has ebbed almost entirely in these books...What remain are human voices, which is to say characters, contending with one another and with their own fears and regrets, as they face the prospect of the godless void that awaits them. The result is...pleasurable, and together the books are the richest and strongest work of McCarthy's career...McCarthy's latest...novels represent a return to human concerns, but ones--love, death, guilt, illusion--experienced and scrutinized on the highest existential plane...As a pair, The Passenger and Stella Maris are an achievement greater than Blood Meridian...or... The Road...In the new novels, McCarthy again sets bravery and ingenuity loose amid inhumanity....The results are not weakly flickering. They are incandescent with life.
--Graeme Wood, The Atlantic