A runaway kid out of Tennessee, fourteen years old, drifts down into Texas in 1849 and falls in with the Glanton gang — real men, scalp hunters the Mexican states paid by the head to kill Apaches, who figured out pretty quick that any dark hair pays the same. McCarthy built the book off a memoir by one of them, and the route they ride is the actual borderland. Riding with them is Judge Holden, seven feet tall, hairless, fluent in everything, who sketches artifacts in a ledger and then destroys them, and who talks about war the way a preacher talks about God. It’s about as violent as a book gets, and not one bit of it is fun. The prose is biblical, unpunctuated, and enormous. Plenty of people call it the great American novel and plenty of people can’t finish it. I’m in the first camp.