Any look at the great Werstern novels should start with the book Harold Bloom called “the ultimate Western”*, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. This is a very, very violent book and should only be read by those who are prepared to face unrelenting carnage.

A great part of the American Myth revolves around the western expansion - the lawless time when the west first began to be settled - and the stories that have arisen are those of good vs. evil; the white-hatted sheriff against the evil outlaw; the innocent settlers against the savage natives. McCarthy obliterates the myth by presenting a version of the violent expansion that had no regard for good or evil at all. There is simply violence on all sides - appalling in scope and seemingly without end. The story follows an un-named young man, referred to only as “the Kid”, who at a young age has developed a taste for meaningless violence and leaves his family to travel to New Orleans and then out to Texas. Eventually the Kid falls into the gang of John Joel Glanton as the gang is hired by the Mexican government to kill Apaches. From this point the story spirals into an almost unending series of atrocities told in an almost biblical manner. What is most disturbing is that many of the events and characters in the book, including Glanton, are based on reality. Glanton’s second in command, Judge Holden, is less a man than the embodiment of an idea - Holden is like the God of War, walking the earth in the form of a man. Many readers of the book have reported that for weeks afterward Judge Holden frequented their nightmares.

In Blood Meridian, McCarthy was attempting to write a novel that could be compared with Moby Dick in its vision and scope and to a very large degree he has succeeded.

* By “ultimate western” Bloom meant that “It culminates all the aesthetic potential that Western fiction can have. I don’t think anyone can hope to improve on it, that it essentially closes out the tradition.” http://www.avclub.com/articles/harold...