The best books on the USA / Mexico border, drug cartels, and misery

If you’ve never read this book, fair warning, you’ll want to throw it across the room in the first five pages. It notoriously eschews all punctuation and most established narrative rules in its telling of a nameless Kid falling in with a vicious band of Indian scalp hunters (by that I mean they hunt Native Americans for a bounty laid on their scalps by the Mexican government). I laid it aside for months before I returned to it. Somewhere around page thirty or so though, I believe the book truly hypnotizes you. Reading it becomes a mystical experience, and you are steadily immersed in an apocalyptic revelation of surreal, otherworldly horror, wherein characters become dream archetypes and every scene vividly paints itself on the mind in strokes of blood.

Its supernatural aspect is undeniable in the timeless character of The Judge, a towering, philosophical albino who metes out life and death with the casual assurance of a slumming god. The book contains my favorite passage in all of literature….a single sentence description of a band of blood-soaked Comanche raiders that spans nearly two and a half pages!

Mixing Faulkner’s gothic language with McCarthy’s sense of history, Blake writes a story of two brothers torn apart by circumstance and their experiences in the Mexican-American War.  Blake captures that sense of aimless wandering that echoes Faulkner’s stories—the rootless characters meandering across the country, not only unsure of their destinations but maybe even indifferent to them. To me, one of the most profound twists in the book is that the brothers don’t seem to care which side of the war they participate in. They are itinerants whose purpose in the world is simply circumstantial; they are instruments of universal forces that they neither question nor understand. 

What can you say about Cormac McCarthy that has not been said before, the poetry in his prose, his fearlessness to go to the human extreme of emotional tension and violence, the elegance of creating a world so real that one does not want to leave, yet cannot stay? The writer in me wants to write just like him, but... I cannot, I will not, for there is only one Cormac McCarthy, and the world could not stand another.