Violence begets violence begets violence.

Cormac McCarthy's epic anti-western masterpiece delivers its almost anti-climatic brutality in economical prose, a fitting style for a fable about an outfit whose arrival portends ruthless and indifferent annihilation for most in their path.

Blood Meridian also presents one of literature's most memorable and infamous villains in the judge. Delicately walking the line in his portrayal between mythological man and demon, McCarthy constructs a character that could have easily fallen into the realm of absurdity and instead sets the template for an intelligent giant that is vile beyond all things and yet commands every moment he is present, and even most where he's not. The judge's preternatural ability to sow violence and depravity is only matched by his skill as a manipulator of lost men. None exemplify that more than his activation of Glanton, the notorious and very real scalp-hunter on a hauntingly patient and nihilistic scorched earth campaign against the Indians who destroyed his family.

The writing, more often than not, feels penned not by a man but from echoes of ancient storytellers reverberating through the desert. McCarthy paints his landscapes; sentinel mountains lit by savage storms that line the endless horizons loom over inhospitable plains. They don't feel like locations in the American Southwest or Mexican Northwest so much as mystical realms, crucibles for creation of evil things or an ultimate evil itself incarnate.

Cormac McCarthy has crafted one of the frontrunners for The Great American Novel, recasting the mythos of Western migration with objective and horrific honesty, without regard for retrospective modern sensibilities. This is a relentless parable about the inherent corruption of man and violence as a means of purpose.

This is essential reading of the highest order.

5 out of 5