Cormac McCarthy, who died Tuesday at the age of 89, was one of America’s most acclaimed contemporary novelists, but his singular style wasn’t to everyone’s taste. Readers tended to love him or hate him, and Kirkus reviewers have run the gamut. Check out these reviews of five of his iconic novels.

Suttree (1978): “Cornelius Buddy Suttree shares the three-fold plight of nearly all Cormac McCarthy heroes: he is an unregenerate loner-outsider, his unwavering isolation is never fully accounted for, and his present life and station are described with a poetic force that at once overwhelms and repels analysis.…McCarthy’s idiosyncratic vocabulary and chronic verbal excesses will put off a lot of readers, but there is a cumulative power and occasional beauty in the relentless wretchedness that Suttree and his biographer wallow in.”

Blood Meridian (1982): “McCarthy, even more than in previous novels, strains for prophetic, Bible-like tones here—with a cast of allegorical types (a judge, a fool, an ex-priest, the kid) and an archaic vocabulary that lurches from “kerfs” and “bedight” to “rimpled” and “thrapple.” But, though there’s something stubbornly impressive about McCarthy’s unwavering gloom, the novel's unceasing slaughter sometimes suggests a spaghetti-western without a hero.”

The Crossing (1994): “Like [All the Pretty Horses], The Crossing concerns a young American rancher living near the Mexican border in the 1930s, a time when the old West is grudgingly entering the modern world while Mexico is being torn apart by revolution.… Relentless, frequently brutal, and morbidly fatalistic, the novel expresses once again McCarthy’s essentially bleak vision. Because he is one of America's foremost literary craftsmen, it is also passionate and compelling.…Like the tales of Homer and Melville, his timeless work will resonate for ages.”

The Road (2006): “Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread. McCarthy pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future.…A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.”

The Passenger (2022): “A beguiling, surpassingly strange novel.…[Bobby] Western doesn’t much like the murky depths, but he’s taken a job as a salvage diver in the waters around New Orleans, where all kinds of strange things lie below the surface—including, at the beginning of McCarthy’s looping saga, an airplane complete with nine bloated bodies.…Enigmatic, elegant, extraordinary: a welcome return after a too-long absence.”

Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.