I read this the way you’d watch a car crash, unable to look away, which is a comparison I’ve seen a few other readers reach for too and I don’t think there’s a better one available. The plot, if you can even call it that, is a bunch of men riding from town to town killing people, scalping for bounty along the Texas-Mexico border in the 1840s, and McCarthy renders it in prose so dense and biblical and specific that the violence stops registering as spectacle and starts registering as something closer to weather, an ambient condition of the world rather than a series of discrete events you’re meant to react to individually.

Judge Holden is the reason this book is going to live in my head permanently. Hairless, enormous, erudite in a way that keeps outpacing every other character in the book, and completely, coherently amoral in his stated philosophy that war is the truest form of divination there is. He’s terrifying specifically because he never breaks character to explain himself as a villain, he just keeps being right, within his own logic, about everything, and the book never gives you a character strong enough to refute him. I’ve read comparisons to No Country for Old Men where people note that book at least gives you Sheriff Bell to balance Chigurh’s void, some kind of moral counterweight holding the ledger in check. Blood Meridian gives you nothing like that. It’s relentless the whole way through and the effect is exactly as bleak as that sounds.

The prose is the other half of why this stuck with me so hard, unpunctuated dialogue, archaic vocabulary I had to look up more than once, sentences that run for half a page and somehow never lose their footing. It’s a genuinely difficult read in the literal sense, I kept my phone nearby for the dictionary the way another reader mentioned doing on a Kindle, and I don’t think that difficulty is incidental to the effect. The density of the language is doing the same work as the density of the violence, wearing you down until you’re reading it the way you’d read scripture you don’t fully agree with but can’t stop hearing. I don’t know that I’d call this enjoyable. I know I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I finished.