Blood Meridian

Absolutely incredible. A novel that I think is likely more potent now, in an age where depictions of violence are more common place than ever before, than it was when it first came out. To me that's one interesting part of reading about reactions to the book when it first came out up until the early 2000s even, the general feeling that it's too violent. If anyone has kept up with television in the past 10 years (Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad), I'd say they could handle Blood Meridian. There are still scenes in the book that will make you shudder, which I think is a bigger testament to this being written in 85 and McCarthy's foreknowledge of the continued evolution of America's obsession with brutality.
The book is of course so much more than the violence McCarthy depicts. To me it's the most brutally realistic vision of the romanticized West I've ever encountered. There are no heroes, moral codes belong to each man's interpretation of his place in the universe, it is not a land of inviting sunsets and enchanting adventure but brimstone and chaos.
And yet amid this intense realism McCarthy blends in the fantastic, the nephilim Judge Holden, pulsating depictions of the desert and seemingly surreal moments the kid experiences. Characters that feel as though they're summations of western archetypes (the protagonist as the epitome of the wanderer without a name, the expriest now ironically turned cutthroat, the crazed bandit leader), this is the balancing act McCarthy walks, he sets before us these concepts or archetypes we've become familiar with in the western canon and subverts them by making them abundantly realistic. These assumptions of character we take as larger than life are presented as no more than gravely flawed and tormented human beings.
This makes for perhaps the most engaging literary experience I've ever had, I've never felt a book so effortlessly flow off the page before yet McCarthy has a rhythm, diction, syntax and verve that makes this addictively entertaining from the first chapter to the epilogue.