Though he published his first novel in 1965, Cormac McCarthy did not become famous until 1992, when All the Pretty Horses, the first installment of his Border Trilogy, won the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award while becoming a New York Times bestseller and blowing 190,000 copies out the door.

Later, Horses was made into a respectable, though not great, movie directed by Billy Bob Thornton and starring Matt Damon. This new novel by McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, is the first since he finished off the Border Trilogy with Cities of the Plain (which was widely reviewed though not particularly well received) - and that was seven years ago.

So the question comes to mind: Has the wait been worth it?

As is all too often the case, the answer is a bit of 'yes,' a bit of 'no' - but let's look at the 'yes' part of this first.

No Country hits the ground running and doesn't stop for breath until about two-thirds of the way through, when it starts to falter. By then, though, the book had this reader cowering in a corner with the lights off, wishing he hadn't taken such a strong stand against gun ownership.

McCarthy's setup for the book is as simple as it is gripping: It's 1980, and Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss is hunting antelope in the desert north of the border in southwest Texas when he happens on three dead bodies, a big pile of heroin and a suitcase full of money.

A lot of money. Forty pounds of it - more than $2 million.

When Moss decides to take the money and run, he sets in motion a chain of events that will leave at least 20 more bodies piling up on the dry, dusty plains and in the streets of small towns on both sides of the border as Moss tries to get away from the gunmen and killers sent to hunt him down from both ends of a drug deal gone very wrong.

In spite of a story that may sound like countless movies and TV shows, what unfolds is, in McCarthy's deft, dark, and evocative handling, a death-waltz across Texas.

While McCarthy takes his title from W.B. Yeats' gently ironic and bittersweet poem, Sailing To Byzantium, a more accurate motto for the novel comes from another Yeats poem that tells us, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere Anarchy is loosed upon the world . . ."

At first, you'll need a scorecard to keep track of who's chasing Moss (and whom they work for). But that's just at first - believe me, they thin out quickly when the bullets start to fly.

On the 'bad guy' side, there's an ex-Special Forces mop-up man; a confusing number of Mexican drug runners, possibly working for someone named Pablo; and, last and certainly not least, Anton Chigurh, a calm, extraordinarily menacing killer who enters the fray as a freelancer and single-handedly accounts for most of the bodies.

The law is looking for Moss as well - the FBI and DEA, of course, as well as local law enforcement, particularly Ed Tom Bell, sheriff of the small town where Moss lives with his young wife, Carla Jean. The book begins, in fact, with a cryptic chapter describing the murder of one of Sheriff Bell's deputies - it is only later we find out who killed the deputy and how it ties in to the narrative.

I don't want to give too much of the plot away. Suffice it to say, Moss, Bell and Chigurh chase each other around in this corner of Texas in a series of encounters in which the only rule seems to be that everybody loses, nobody wins.

So, how 'bad' are the bad guys? Well, Chigurh (pronounced like sugar), the worst of the lot, carries an air-powered 'cattlegun' of the sort used to kill cows in a slaughterhouse. He manages to leave a lot of corpses lying around with neat little holes punched in their foreheads.

In a street gun-battle in the middle of the night in a small Texas town, Chigurh stops long enough to execute a wounded man with a pistol: "Chigurh shot him through the forehead and then stood watching him. Watching the capillaries break up in his eyes. The light receding. Watching his own image degrade in that squandered world."

Such writing freights the story with an almost Shakespearean majesty and eloquence, prose designed to elevate and, perhaps, astonish the reader. Such a style carries with it certain risks: It can give extraordinary dignity to the protagonists but also make them sound like they don't quite fit into our mortal world any longer.

Take Chigurh, a cold, remorseless Angel of Death who interrupts his murderous rampage every once in a while to engage some of his victims in cryptic conversations of fatalistic philosophy before he kills them - a development they might consider a blessing by then, as the philosophy gets a bit heavy.

Chigurh offers this consolation to a woman just before he shoots her: "When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking that I second say the world."

In such a passage, the eloquence of McCarthy's language threatens to deteriorate into a parody of itself, to slide from simple, in its best sense, to simple-minded.

In the Border Trilogy, McCarthy looked into our past and found a sense of dignity and honor, of respect for the land and its inhabitants and of the possibilities of redemptive love in even the worst of circumstances. It raised his characters above the often trivial detail of their ragged, desperate lives.

In those books, particularly All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy's lyrical prose placed us in his characters' hearts and lives, which, however low or diminished, were treated as though in a cathedral, evoking an awe for the commonplaces of existence that approached the sacred.

Here, McCarthy gives us a book that has everything - courage, dignity, honor, endurance, all the verities - except hope. We are left with a terrible despair and weariness when, near the close of the story, Sheriff Bell, the moral center of the book, talks with a deputy he had served with many years before. (Note: McCarthy omits all quotation marks and most apostrophes in his prose.)

Bell begins:

Do you think God knows what's happenin?

I expect he does.

You think he can stop it?

No. I dont.

The old deputy's point of view seems to be the book's as well.

Those readers who have admired McCarthy for his stoic characters and their quiet dignity may find this new book jarring and disorienting. The author, who turns 72 this month, has given us a bleak, savage and utterly hopeless look at a ruined world, a world that seems to have overwhelmed him in its cruelty and brutality.

Near the end of the book, Sheriff Bell talks of an old couple he read about who were killed for their Social Security check and muses about the killers, "They'd torture em first, I dont know why. Maybe their television was broke."

What you ultimately think of this book may depend on your reaction to this sort of nihilistic turn. Nonetheless, I recommend it for the extraordinary power of the writing. The prose here is so hard-bitten it'll make your teeth hurt just to crack the binding.

Later, when you've finished the book and the day ends and the darkness falls, you'll have plenty of time to worry about what it all meant.

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.

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