Blood Meridian (1985)

 

This remarkable novel tends to be typically identified as Cormac McCarthy's best, at least to date, and certainly it's my first choice, one of those very special books that is not only worth rereading but actually seems to get only better and better every time through. My first time I found it a bit difficult—the dense and allusive language, the murky plot points, the march forward across quintessential 19th-century American West landscapes and experience, overlaid by a skein of repulsive yet seductively beautiful horror, and the opaqueness of its ostensible main character, known only as "the kid." Another tour through let me see more of what McCarthy is doing, and incidentally made evident that, for me anyway, the real main character here is the ubiquitous, malovently charming, and always unsettling Judge Holden, who simply appears everywhere that matters. Him and the landscape of history. Wrestling. Alternatively titled "The Evening Redness in the West," which I think tells us more about McCarthy's intentions regarding bloodshed than sunsets, this tells a hallucinatory version of the story of America and its self-declared manifest destiny, detailing the violence, brutality, and casual cruelties of the usurpation and occupation of the far side of the North American continent, with a muscular language pulsing with hypnotic rhythms. The action often grows positively unworldly, as with one arduous trek across a desolate stretch of mountainous, boulder-strewn desert, and the whole thing feels like a dream that someone else is having, and probably would like to wake up from.

In case it's not at the library.