The three artists that have influenced me the most are comedian Nick Mullen and authors Charles Bukowski and Cormac McCarthy.
McCarthy is an outlier compared to those other two. Other than our penchant for nihilism, we really don’t have any overlapping sensibilities. So I don’t try to emulate him. No one can.
But what inspired me about his writing is the way how he elevated the medium. McCarthy didn’t give a shit about correct grammar or punctuation. Some of his novels have entire conversations in Spanish and he doesn’t care to translate them into English or explain what they were about. He sometimes went into minute details over mundane actions that had no real consequence to the story. Nevertheless, you were completely engaged in this dark world of McCarthy’s creation.
While the obituaries since his death have cited No Country For Old Men and The Road as his most famous works, in my opinion (and really, the opinion of those in the know) his finest novel is Blood Meridian. I’ll go a step further and say that it might be the greatest American novel ever written. McCarthy’s vision of the Old West was dark and violent because the spilling of blood was the only language that land understood. Yet more importantly, never had violence been portrayed more poetically.
It’s unfortunate that it takes death for us to realize this, but hopefully now Cormac McCarthy will be recognized as one of the greatest writers of all time.
The Internet Ruined Everything 