Fully 16 years after The Road, an 89-year-old Cormac McCarthy has published two new companion novels, likely to be his last, in two months: The Passenger and Stella Maris. The very first sentence of The Passenger tells us that McCarthy is back: “It had snowed lightly in the night and her frozen hair was gold and crystalline and her eyes were frozen cold and hard as stone.” Death comes packaged in one of those commaless, conveyor-belt sentences. It is very much trademark McCarthy. But the register isn’t that of Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men. In those previous works, there were beheadings, castrations, lynchings. In his new novels, characters die in seemlier ways: either offstage or in the silent, snow-covered woods. Has McCarthy gone soft in old age?