It certainly did for me. It arrives with deceptive ease, settles in slowly, and leaves behind the feeling of having lived another life. Its greatness lies not only in its characters, vast landscape and epic scope, but also in its sense of finality. It says what it needs to say, fully and generously.
Which is precisely why it is best left alone.
Why Lonesome Dove should stand on its own
Although Lonesome Dove later became part of a larger series, its power comes from its completeness. The novel’s length is already expansive, its emotional arc deeply satisfying, its ending earned without qualification. It does not feel unfinished, nor does it invite continuation.
The sequels and prequels, by contrast, suffer from comparison. Personally, I found Streets of Laredo particularly dispiriting. Lazy even. Stripped of the warmth and balance that anchored Lonesome Dove, it offers a bleaker vision without the corresponding depth. Read as a standalone Western, it may hold some interest. Read as a continuation, it diminishes rather than extends what came before.
The prequels fare little better. They provide context where none is needed. Lonesome Dove thrives on what it withholds. Its characters do not require backstory to justify their weight. The novel stands because it is already whole.
For readers who loved Lonesome Dove, the answer is not to keep circling its lesser shadows, but to move forward into a different, equally serious engagement with the modern Western.
The natural place to go after Lonesome Dove is the Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy.
The case for Cormac McCarthy
This is where Cormac McCarthy enters with quiet authority. McCarthy does not imitate McMurtry, nor does he sentimentalise the West. Instead, his work confronts the same historical moment from another angle, asking what remains once the myths have thinned and the land no longer belongs to those who ride it.
His The Border Trilogy is a rare achievement in literary consistency. Across three interlinked novels, McCarthy sustains a singular vision of the West as a place of loss, moral testing, and diminishing possibility. There is no sense of diminishing returns here. Each book deepens the last.
Language shaped by land
McCarthy’s writing is precise, austere, and often devastating. His descriptions of landscape are not ornamental. The land shapes the people who move through it, just as surely as history does. Horses are rendered with intimacy and respect. Violence is never casual. Silence matters.
Where Lonesome Dove balances humour and grief, McCarthy pares everything back. His prose insists on attention. The result is a Western stripped of comfort but rich in meaning.
All the Pretty Horses (1992)
All the Pretty Horses follows John Grady Cole, a teenage cowboy whose family ranch is sold, severing his connection to the life he was raised for. He rides into Mexico with his friend Rawlins, chasing a vision of honour, love, and horsemanship that is already slipping away.
The novel unfolds as a harsh education. Idealism meets brutality. Romance gives way to survival. Yet McCarthy never mocks John Grady’s beliefs. Instead, he examines their cost.
Quote:
“He rode with the sun coppering his face.”
The Crossing (1994)
The Crossing centres on Billy Parham, whose repeated journeys into Mexico form a long meditation on fate, loss, and moral uncertainty. Beginning with his attempt to return a captured wolf to the wild, the novel moves through stories within stories, accumulating grief rather than resolving it.
This is the most demanding book of the trilogy, slower and more philosophical, but also the most devastating. It speaks directly to readers drawn to the reflective weight beneath Lonesome Dove’s narrative.
Quote:
“The world is not the way it’s supposed to be.”
Cities of the Plain (1998)
Cities of the Plain brings John Grady Cole and Billy Parham together near the end of their lives as cowboys. The old world is visibly closing. The West is ending. Military expansion, economic pressure, and changing values press in from all sides.
John Grady’s final attempt at love stands in stark contrast to Billy’s hard-earned caution. The novel’s conclusion is restrained and devastating, completing the trilogy not with spectacle but with recognition.
Quote:
“What’s gone is gone.”
Where Lonesome Dove readers should turn next
Lonesome Dove deserves its singular place. Its brilliance does not require supplementation. What it invites instead is a continuation of a conversation about the West as loss rather than legend.
Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy offers that continuation with extraordinary discipline and depth. Rather than returning to weaker extensions of a single great novel, readers will find greater reward in a body of work that sustains its literary ambition across decades.
If Lonesome Dove opened the door, McCarthy shows what waits beyond it.
Perhaps one of the Border Trilogy’s greatest strengths is that it does not simply stand on its own. It also serves as a doorway into McCarthy’s wider body of work. These novels introduce his rhythms, his moral seriousness, and his uncompromising attention to land and violence in a way that is demanding but not forbidding. For many readers, they offer the ideal point of entry, grounding McCarthy’s larger concerns in recognisable human longing before pushing further into darker territory.
And beyond that doorway lies one of the most formidable achievements in modern American literature. Blood Meridian is not only another literary Western, but one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century. Violent, hallucinatory, and philosophically relentless, it strips the West of romance entirely, exposing the raw machinery of conquest and cruelty beneath the myth. Its brilliance is terrifying, uncompromising, and unforgettable. But that, perhaps, is for another post.
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