Blood Meridian

McCarthy hates a comma the way I hate an unbalanced rules-to-payoff ratio, on principle, and it took me a real chunk of the opening chapters to adjust to sentences that just keep going, no quotation marks separating dialogue from narration, clauses stacking until you have to go back to the start of one and rebuild it in your head. Once I adjusted, though, that style stopped being an obstacle and started doing real work, an unstoppable, breathless quality that matches exactly what the book is describing, a nightmare odyssey through Texas and northern Mexico in the 1850s that never lets up.

The judge is the reason this book is going to stay with me. Not a villain in any conventional sense, closer to an amoral force that happens to have a body and a voice, and McCarthy never once explains him, never gives you the scene where his motivations get spelled out, which is the correct choice, an explained judge would be smaller than the one on the page. The kid, by contrast, gets almost nothing, barely a name, and that absence is doing its own quiet work across the whole book.

I won’t pretend the violence is easy. It’s constant, described plainly rather than for shock value, which somehow makes it land harder rather than softer, and there were stretches where I had to put the book down for a day before picking it back up. That’s not a complaint. A Western that flinched from what it’s actually depicting wouldn’t be telling the truth about what it’s set during. This is the best written thing I’ve read in years, sentence for sentence, and I expect to reread it, which I say about almost nothing.