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Cormac McCarthy sold something like 3,000 copies of Blood Meridian in its first year. That number gets repeated so often in Blood Meridian pieces it's basically become part of the mythology itself, and it's worth mentioning here for the same reason everyone else mentions it: the book that eventually got crowned the great American western, the one Harold Bloom put above nearly everything else in the canon, spent most of the eighties as a commercial nonevent. It took Oprah's book club, of all things, plus twenty years of professors assigning it and novelists quietly stealing from it, before Blood Meridian became required reading for anyone trying to write seriously about the frontier.

The book earned that reputation by refusing to let the West function as a stage for anybody's heroism. McCarthy built the plot around a real outfit, the Glanton gang, scalp hunters who worked the Texas-Mexico border in 1849 and 1850, murdering for bounty money until the bounty money became beside the point. His main source was Samuel Chamberlain's memoir My Confession, which happens to be the only historical document that mentions Judge Holden at all, a few scattered lines about a huge, strange man who rode with Glanton's crew. McCarthy had almost nothing to work from and built one of American fiction's most fully realized characters out of it.

The Judge is the reason people can't stop writing about this book forty years later. He's enormous and hairless, fluent in geology and languages and law, and he gives long, genuinely persuasive speeches arguing that war is the only true form of worship, that everything else people do is just a stall tactic against violence. McCarthy doesn't hand him weak arguments to knock down. He gives him the best prose in the novel and lets him win most of his own debates on the page. You finish a Judge monologue understanding exactly why he believes what he believes, which is a much harder thing to sit with than if he'd just been written as a lunatic.

The Kid gets almost the opposite treatment. He drifts through the book doing terrible things without much interior explanation and occasionally, briefly, not doing them, and McCarthy never clarifies whether those hesitations mean anything. He's not a moral counterweight to the Judge. He's just a person who was present for atrocity for years without either running it or fully surrendering to it, which turns out to be a much more common condition than either pure villainy or pure innocence. When the Judge finds him again at the very end, in the outhouse scene McCarthy declines to actually depict, the book keeps that same refusal to clarify anybody's soul all the way to the last page.

That's really what changed how people picture the frontier. Older westerns needed clean lines, good guys and bad guys, conquest read as destiny or conquest read as sin. Blood Meridian just shows men doing horrific things for reasons that made sense to them at the time, on a landscape that offered no verdict either way, and lets that sit there unresolved. It allows the violence of the American frontier to haunt the present, past, and future, without offering any reasoning beyond the tacit acknowledgement that violence is the primary game we all humans play.