Before I knew it, I was up to page 15, but this, the opening line; a run-on sentence that reads like a song:
They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gesturing to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face.
Movement, sound, characters, environment, purpose; all in the very first sentence. It’s McCarthy at his best. Note the alliteration that smooths it out and makes it flow lyrically with pace and language. Say it aloud, sing it.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology