I'm roiled by this book.

This is the most violent book I've ever read. That is a slippery distinction considering the fantastic massacres and planetary destruction that I've sailed through in my reading, but Blood Meridian is about its violence in a way that Star Wars isn't. It indicts all mankind as a product of and producer of brutality, and all civilization as a disguise for that truth.

To read this book and be drawn in by the force of its imagery, to be surrounded by its meticulous vision of historical savagery, is to participate in its nihilism. A part of me feels like I rode along with Glanton and his cursed marauders. This is a book of monsters that made me feel like a monster.

It's far from seamless: the famous prose is hit-or-miss. Sometimes it dragged my mind down a track of horror, like a bad dream. Other times it just befuddled me. It does not seem to me that, as others have said, every word here is perfectly chosen. Instead it seems like Cormac McCarthy has managed to dump all the thoughts in his head out onto the page, sometimes coherently.

What thoughts, though.