Start with All the Pretty Horses. It has McCarthy's prose at full strength — the unpunctuated dialogue, the long sentences that run on conjunctions, the untranslated Spanish — attached to a story that actually moves: two teenagers ride into Mexico looking for work with horses and find something much worse. It won the National Book Award, it is roughly three hundred pages, and nobody has ever failed to finish it because it was too grim.
The alternative most people are pointed toward is Blood Meridian, and starting there is a mistake for perhaps half of readers. It is his best book and it is a wall: a scalp-hunting expedition across the 1840s borderlands, told in biblical cadence, with violence that is relentless rather than punctuating, and a character in Judge Holden who is one of the genuinely frightening inventions in American fiction. Read it third or fourth, not first. If you must start there, at least know that the first fifty pages set the register for the next three hundred and it does not lighten.
The Border Trilogy
All the Pretty Horses, then The Crossing, then Cities of the Plain, in that order. This one is not contested — publication and chronological order agree, and the third book only pays off because it brings the protagonists of the first two together.
An honest warning about the middle volume: The Crossing is the most beautiful book of the three and the slowest by a distance. Its long central section, in which a boy walks a pregnant wolf back to Mexico, is either the finest thing McCarthy ever wrote or two hundred pages of nothing, depending on the reader. It also carries several extended monologues from strangers — a priest, an old man, a blind veteran — that most readers find either the point of the book or the reason they stopped. Push through; Cities of the Plain is shorter and reads fast.
The accessible late novels
No Country for Old Men is the tightest thing he wrote: a drug deal gone wrong in west Texas, a hunter with a case of money, and Anton Chigurh. It reads like a thriller because it was drafted as a screenplay first. If you want to test whether McCarthy is for you before committing, this and The Road are the two-hundred-page answers.
The Road is the one most readers have heard of — a father and son pushing a shopping cart through ash. It is his most emotionally direct book and his least characteristic, and it works fine as a starting point if bleakness does not deter you. It just tells you less about what the rest of his work is like.
Blood Meridian, and then the last two
After the Border Trilogy, read Blood Meridian. Then, if you want the whole arc, the two novels published in 2022: The Passenger and Stella Maris. They are a pair — a salvage diver and his mathematician sister — and they are unlike everything before: talky, obsessed with quantum mechanics and Kurt Gödel, sparing with plot. Stella Maris is a transcript of psychiatric interviews with essentially no action at all. Opinions divide sharply; a fair number of long-time readers found them an anticlimax, and a fair number consider them his most personal work.
Where to stop, and what is missing
Stopping after Blood Meridian is entirely defensible — that is the canonical McCarthy. This path also omits the early Appalachian novels: The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of God and Suttree. Suttree in particular has a devoted following as his funniest and most autobiographical book. They are harder going than anything above and are best saved for after you know you want more. Readers who come to McCarthy through his prose usually end up at William Faulkner next, which is where the sentence style comes from.
Follow the full ordered path here: Cormac McCarthy Reading Order: Where to Start.
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