Comparisons between this and All the Pretty Horses seem inevitable. Here we have another buldingsroman: a teenage cowboy who rides south into the Mexican frontier, coming of age through scenes of privation and violence. But Billy Parham's journey has a a peculiarly mystical quality all its own. He keeps meeting these extremely odd people out in the wilderness who feel the need to explain to him, in deliriously long, wide-ranging monologues, their gnostically inclined ideas of God, History, Man, Fate, what have you. But these weird confessions seem somehow necessary, since in between them, in the main narrative, this kid loses EVERYTHING that ties him to the world. That's what is so weird about this. It's utterly brutal, but it's got this really rich, contemplative spiritual dimension which is so often chocked out by the human cruelty in Mccarthy's work. It's got a powerfully redemptive quality which I've never come across in his writing before, almost in spite of itself. Note: Tons of the dialogue is in Spanish, and it really helps to have a bi-lingual dictionary by you're side when your going through it.