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Javier Bardem owes his career to Hollywood to this book, as author Cormac McCarthy lies the groundwork for the principled villain archetype in Blood Meridian, before he updated the character with Anton Chigurh, a similar character that operates in a more modern setting. The difference though is that Anton Chigurh is a villain that some readers/viewers ultimately root for to get away. I cannot say that any part of me feels the same way about the judge.

I will have to revisit my rating of this book at a later date as I continue to digest it. McCarthy's disdain for punctuation marks made this book difficult for me to delve into, as I had shelved it several times before finally finishing it. The graphic violence is also so over the top that it is hard to see if there even is a plot to this story, until the latter portions of the book when Judge Holden begins espousing his philosophic fatalistic world views, perhaps as a way of rationalizing his cruelty and sociopath tendencies. He is crazy, and yet in the end he is "right," from the context of his narrowly framed rules of his particular world view, one that is so dark and twisted, I'm almost surprised we have not seen this adapted to film yet.