Some years ago, I was doing a book promotion tour, and my driver dropped me off early for an event at one of the largest indie bookstores in the country. I tracked down the store owner, and we both had time to kill. So we embarked on a far-ranging conversation about novels.

The owner was just as passionate about books as me. It wasn’t just his job, it was his fixation. He was obsessively interested in contemporary fiction—and for a good reason: he often hosted the leading novelists of the day in his store. He knew them both as writers and individuals.

He had stories to tell, and I couldn’t hear enough of them. I felt like a junkie who gets introduced to the cartel leader—the insider who can point me to ecstasies I don’t yet know about. So we had a lovely conversation. I still remember it years later—not just the dialogue but even more his love of literature.

At one juncture, I asked my new friend a question. “But who is your favorite? You love all these writers, but who is the best living novelist?”

He didn’t need to think for long.

“Well, of course, there’s Cormac,” he said.

[Long pause] “But he’s in a class by himself. So let’s talk about some others.”

It was like I’d asked a Chicago Bulls fan to name the best basketball player of all time. The answer was so obvious that it was hardly worth discussing. You had to go down to number two or three on the list to get a real argument going.

My interlocutor couldn’t even be bothered to give the full name. Just Cormac—like Elvis or Oprah or Pele. A couple syllables were sufficient.

I knew many people who had the same view of Cormac McCarthy back then. And that was before he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Road, and the Coen brothers turned No Country for Old Men into a cult classic film. Even before those events, Cormac was larger than life, like a bleak Biblical prophet who somehow was writing novels in the current day.

Was he our best contemporary American novelist?

Cormac McCarthy’s first 5 novels were totally ignored. . . . Even Blood Merdian—now widely considered a modern classic of American fiction—got remaindered after only selling 1,883 copies.

I really don’t like rankings. I stopped ranking my best-of-year albums some time ago. When you get to the highest level of any art form, there are always several figures of historic importance to the idiom.

But Cormac McCarthy was clearly in that elite company. I might hem and haw, and offer three or four other names. But he belonged on the shortest of short lists.

Late last year, I learned that Cormac was planning to release his first new novel in 16 years. This caught my attention, as you can imagine. But even more striking—McCarthy was planning to release two books in late 2022.

These were interrelated novels, entitled The Passenger (published on Oct. 25) and Stella Maris (published on Dec. 6). As it turned out, these would be the final works released in McCarthy’s life—because he died two days ago at age 89.

He had reportedly been working on these books for four decades.

But it was surprising—at least to me—how little media attention this was getting. NPR, in a ho-hum write-up, explained that these books were “hard to categorize,” and described McCarthy fans as “rabid” and “fanatics.” You got the feeling they were reporting on some fringe cult that needed to be put in quarantine.

The New York Times kept using the word “portentous” in its review. That’s a word that has a positive and negative meaning—so take your pick. The Washington Post offered much the same, telling readers “prepare to be baffled.” If McCarthy’s final opus won any awards, I didn’t hear about it.

And many media outlets just ignored the book. But I guess that’s no shock—in the 16 years since McCarthy’s previous novel, most of the newspapers in America either fired their book editors or went out of business. In those periodicals, a new novel by a major author is like the proverbial tree falling in the forest—no matter how imposing all that wood pulp might be, nobody hears a thing.

Given this, I wasn’t even sure I should read the McCarthy books, except. . .

. . . Except that I kept hearing from individual readers how amazing these two novels were. These were people I trusted and their enthusiasm was off the charts.

So, finally, last month, I started reading The Passenger—and it was an extraordinary experience. So I followed up with Stella Maris, and it was just as brilliant, maybe better.

I thought I already had a good sense of this author’s range and capabilities. I knew he was a powerful psychological novelist. I knew he was a unsurpassed landscape novelist. I knew he had a formidable command of incident and character. But I had no idea that McCarthy was so skilled at writing dialogue—these works are filled with pages that could go straight into an O