Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy • 1985
Devastation Rating
violence West history nihilism
Our Take
McCarthy's anti-Western follows the Kid and the Judge across the Texas-Mexico borderlands in an orgy of historical violence that refuses to justify or explain itself. The Judge is the most terrifying figure in American literature — not because he is evil but because he is coherent. War is God. The dance at the end is not a metaphor.
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