I Was There to Inflict Death

‘I have clandestine conversations with supposedly nonexistent personages,’ Alicia Western tells her psychiatrist in Stella Maris, the second of two novels by Cormac McCarthy published this autumn. The leader of these phantoms is called the Thalidomide Kid. He’s a bit over three feet tall (Alicia measured this by comparing their shadows), has a bald and scarred head and flippers for hands. ‘He looked like he’d been brought into the world with icetongs,’ McCarthy writes, the implication being that no one would want to touch him.