Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the West is without a doubt one of the goriest, bleakest, most blood drenched books I've ever encountered. That being said, I have to point out that this isn't all purely for shock value. No, the book has a literate tone to it that seems to originate from a different time and place. McCarthy's ability to write about characters who range from the illiterate and borderline mentally defective to the most well-spoken and wordily has a lot to do with that tone and his unique voice regarding the nature of humanity.

What I find intriguing about the book is that McCarthy's tone isn't one of moral outrage and he doesn't try to compensate for the harshness by injecting some highly moralistic character as a counterbalance to those who engage in acts of depravity beyond most people's ability to comprehend. Rather, McCarthy adopts a highly neutral stance in order to strip bare the high-handed romance of the "Wild West" and portray the country for what it sometimes resembled, a literal hell on earth. To say the book is a "horror" story is not too far of a stretch, but not in the sense that Stephen King writes horror. It's a horror that's all too real and it's personified in the looming character of the Judge, who is without a doubt one of the most terrifying figures in recent literature.

The book isn't for everyone, and the gore factor will sway most people to give up early, but if you can stomach that, you can see one of the better writers today create a world both wholly strange to us and all too familiar.