Blood Meridian

McCarthy follows a runaway teenager who falls in with the Glanton gang, real mercenaries paid by the scalp along the Texas-Mexico border. There is barely a plot. There is a sequence of raids, deserts, and killings, narrated in long Biblical sentences with almost no punctuation and no comfort. Presiding over all of it is Judge Holden, a hairless giant who quotes geology and law and argues that war is the truest form of worship. The prose is the reason to read it. It makes ordinary brutality sound like scripture, and never once looks away.