No Country for Old Men

Cormac McCarthy

Illustrated by Gérard DuBois

Cormac McCarthy’s sparse and beautiful writing is perfectly mirrored by Gérard DuBois’s hauntingly understated images for this Folio Society edition of the Western thriller No Country for Old Men.

‘Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction, and I don’t want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work.’

With his pale blue eyes and dead stare, McCarthy’s villain Chigurh remains one of modern fiction’s most memorable bad guys. Set in West Texas, No Country for Old Men unfurls from the bloody aftermath of a clash of cartels, a deal gone wrong, and a very, very bad decision. Audiences remain captivated throughout by the stone-cold killer at the heart of McCarthy’s cinematic Western. Gérard DuBois, whose illustrations for Folio’s The Road won him the Moira Gemmill Illustrator of the Year Prize at the V&As, returns with his signature style that so perfectly complements McCarthy’s writing. His masterfully chosen colour palette paints scenes in black-and-white or faded desert hues, shot through with splashes of blood red. Through seven quietly arresting images, DuBois nods to traditional Western artists while capturing a stillness, often in the aftermath of violence or the tension of waiting. Bound in cloth screen-printed with a design by the artist, the cover art is muted yet beautifully rendered in dusky ochre. When you look closely, you glimpse the startling body count reached by the end of McCarthy’s modern Western masterpiece of American literature. 

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PRODUCTION DETAILS

Bound in screen-printed cloth

Set in Maxime

224 pages

Black & white illustrated title-page spread plus 6 colour illustrations

Plain slipcase

9˝ x 5¾˝

AN UNRELENTING CLASSIC

With its dark themes, exploration of violence and morality, and vividly drawn central characters, it's no surprise that the Coen Brothers’ 2007 adaptation of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men swept the 2008 Academy Awards©. From the first spectacularly violent scene, we know that Chigurh is a terrifying adversary, described as ‘pretty much pure evil’ by McCarthy himself, who worked with the Coen brothers on the film adaptation. The violence is uniquely poetic in its descriptions, and the sense of menace is unrelenting. Written in between Blood Meridian and The Road, and after his ‘Border Trilogy’, this story is sparser in style than McCarthy’s earlier novels. Written originally in screenplay form in only six months, it’s a stunning example of McCarthy’s broad storytelling genius and was an obvious choice for a Folio edition to add to any McCarthy fan’s collection. 

BIOGRAPHIES

About Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island in 1933. He later went to Chicago, where he worked as a mechanic while writing his first novel, The Orchard Keeper, which was published in 1965. After several years touring Europe and then living in Tennessee, in the late 1970s McCarthy moved to Texas, and in 1979 published his fourth novel, Suttree, a book that had occupied his writing life on and off for 20 years. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian in 1985 (Folio 2022). All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of the 'Border Trilogy', was published in 1992. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was later turned into a feature film. After concluding the 'Border Trilogy', McCarthy's next novel, No Country for Old Men, was published in 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a novel in dramatic form, The Sunset Limited, originally performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago. The Road (2006; Folio 2021) won the Pulitzer Prize. McCarthy died in June 2023.

About Gérard DuBois

Gérard DuBois was born in France in 1968, studied graphic design in Paris and then crossed the Atlantic to live in Montreal. His illustrations have appeared in major North American and European publications, among them the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, GQ, Rolling Stone, New Yorker and Playboy, as well as in more than 20 books. His acrylic pieces are to be found in many private collections, including those of Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro, and Canada Post included his artwork in its 2018 Great Canadian Illustrators stamp series. His work for the Folio Society includes illustrations for Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales (2019), and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2021), Blood Meridian (2022) and No Country for Old Men (2023). DuBois’s many garlands include the Hamilton King Award, four gold medals from the Society of Illustrators and the Moira Gemmel Illustrator of the Year prize at the 2022 V&A Illustration Awards for his work on the Folio Society edition of The Road.