Cormac McCarthy is now on OpenFiction

OpenFiction started, as these things often do, with the books we knew best. Science Fiction. Fantasy. The universes that reward obsessive tracking - the ones with twenty named characters in a chapter, a magic system with seventeen rules, and a reading order that genuinely matters. It made sense to begin there. Those are the books that need a platform like this most.

But fiction is bigger than that, and so is the kind of reading that OpenFiction exists to support.

Cormac McCarthy is not a fantasy writer. He wrote Westerns, Southern Gothic, post-apocalyptic fiction, crime. He avoided punctuation, shunned interviews, refused to explain himself, and produced some of the most demanding and rewarding novels in the American literary tradition. He died in June 2023, leaving behind a body of work that has only grown in stature since.

His work is now seeded on OpenFiction, covering all ten of his most well-known books - from the early Appalachian gothic of The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark through to the The Border Trilogy and The Road. Characters, relationships, and states are tracked across the full body of work.

Why McCarthy?

It is a fair question. His novels are not, on the surface, the kind of thing you need a character tracker for. They tend to be spare. Several have no chapter divisions at all. The Road has no named characters, just a father and a son.

But McCarthy's work rewards this kind of attention for different reasons. His characters recur. John Grady Cole appears in both All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain. Billy Parham spans The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. Tracking where a character begins, what they lose, and where they end up is not a trivial exercise across three novels written over six years.

Blood Meridian - widely regarded as his masterpiece and one of the great American novels of any century - introduces Judge Holden, a character so strange and so fully realised that readers have been arguing about him for forty years. Having a place to anchor that conversation is useful.

The broader point

OpenFiction has always been intended as a platform for serious literary fiction, not just genre fiction. The Science fiction and fantasy content came first because that is where the complexity is most visible - the sheer number of characters, the intricate world-building, the reading orders that matter. But the same instinct that makes you want to track Kelsier's Crew through Mistborn also applies when you are trying to keep the Parham brothers straight across 600 pages of McCarthy, or remember exactly what Anton Chigurh is and is not in No Country for Old Men.

OpenFiction has always been intended as a platform for serious literary fiction, not just genre fiction.

Good fiction, regardless of genre, has people in it. People have histories, relationships, fates. Keeping track of those things is what OpenFiction is for.

McCarthy is the first major addition in this direction. He will not be the last. If there are authors or titles you would like to see added, the content request feature is there for exactly that purpose.