Blood Meridian

A fourteen-year-old runaway from Tennessee, known only as the Kid, drifts into the hostile borderlands between Texas and Mexico in the nineteenth century and is swept up by the Glanton gang, scalp hunters who prey on Indigenous Americans. Presiding over their violence is Judge Holden: huge, hairless, learned and utterly cold, a figure who seems to belong as much to myth as to history. Yet the hunters are being hunted too.

McCarthy's prose is the real astonishment, spare one moment and ornate, almost scriptural, the next, carrying scenes of appalling brutality across a desert rendered with terrible beauty. It is at once a Western and a dismantling of everything the Western pretends to be. For anyone with a strong stomach who wants American fiction at its darkest and most ambitious, this is the novel that defines him.