I Read Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian"

And All I Got Was This Nihilistic Dread

What fucks me up the most about this book is that the parts that I don’t even like that much such as the punctuation-lite formatting and the run-on sentences eventually start to make a kind of incoherent logic. McCarthy wants you to feel a certain way, and as he paints a landscape of America in the early 1800s full of lawless murderers dressed in medals and bleached ox skulls and vultures circling and a night sky dotted with twinkling lights and a group on the horizon lumbering slowly away and the distant sounds of wolves he simply knows that this is the correct way for the book to read and that will be that.

And similarly, he understood what was best to show and what was best not to show. No one will ever truly understand the Judge, and that’s for the best, because he defies explanation. All of the supernatural elements are lightly touched upon, straining credulity but never breaking it, and then left to that. Is the Judge the devil, as the preacher says? Did all of the Glanton gang meet him earlier in their lives as the ex priest says? Does he actually never age, or does he simply appear not to? Is this actually America in the 1850s or is it a Hell for the kinds of people who would become scalphunters? What happened to the kid in the ending?

McCarthy refused to answer, all the way to his grave, because he provided just enough to land all one-or-another questions on the edge of the proverbial coin. Both are true, both are not. The Judge is a monster; the Judge is proven correct by the world he exists in.

To alter it by adding or subtracting a single component would ruin it; it is a delicate balance to tell the reader just enough that their imagination and dread fills the blanks. Landing it so perfectly on said edge is a goal all writers can only hope to aspire to.